Canadian sex workers deserve better
April 20, 2007
It’s no surprise that federal Justice minister Rob Nicholson is against decriminalizing prostitution. A party with Alliance roots just isn’t going to see its way clear to taking action on the issues of the sex trade.
But it’s still pretty galling to have to read Nicholson’s comments on the matter. Decriminalizing prostitution would lead to the exploitation of women, says Nicholson, and therefore can’t be tolerated.
Nice theory. But what he’s actually saying is that he upholds the status quo.
In other words, the tens of thousands of Canadian women and men who work in the sex trade will just have to figure a way out of it, because the government isn’t prepared to do a damn thing about their working conditions. The killings and disappearances of hundreds of sex workers will continue unabated, because nothing is going to change.
I just don’t get it. The sex trade exists because the men of our communities buy sex. There’s a demand, therefore there’s a supply. That’s how a free market works, as Nicholson well knows.
So even if Nicholson’s dream came true to end the steady flow of Canadians of all ages into the sex trade, not even 24 hours would go by before someone had hooked into a new supply of sex workers from some distant land where people needed money. Got to feed that demand.
The sex trade is on our streets, and in our newspapers, phone books and magazines. It’s on our televisions. It’s in our DVD players. Aside from drugs, sex is just about the most readily available service in any city - and on sale around the clock to boot.
Not only that, but it’s the one service that unites the world. Communist-controlled, dictatorship, capitalist, military-led, profoundly religious - whatever the form of government, sex is always for sale somewhere in the country.
Sex is also common tourist fare. I visited Cuba years ago and saw grandpas from Toronto and Montreal buying young girls for as litle as $5 US. More recently, I had the distinct displeasure during a trip to Prague of being seated for a restaurant meal next to three American sex tourists engaged in a loud and loathsome conversation about the night before. Here in Victoria, workers plan for the tourist season.
So what could possibly be our rationale for shutting out the workers?
Why is their workplace unregulated and without oversight? Why do we even have such a thing as outdoor sex workers? Why do the workers live in shame and profound stigma, judged at every juncture of their lives, while their buyers enjoy ease of service and complete anonymity?
And why do we carry on in this foolish charade about how we’re going to address prostitution in Canada by “focusing on reducing its prevalence?” Give me a break, Minister Nicholson. Just say it straight up: You’ve got no intention of doing anything about Canada’s sex trade.
Reducing the prevalence of prostitution is likely an impossible goal even in an ideal world unless all efforts were focused on reducing demand. But that goal is even farther out of reach in a time when governments are also slashing social supports on all fronts.
Children in particular drift into the sex trade because there’s no support system around them - in their home, at their school or in whatever recreational activities they might have been doing had they ever b een connected to them. Outdoor sex work is also primarily an issue of social disadvantage, along with whatever it is that sends men to prowl the streets for sex and violence.
Nicholson’s comments are particularly nervy given that his party has often led the charge around social-spending cuts. I’d sure like to hear his theories on how our country will reduce the prevalence of sex workers while actively priming the pump for more disadvantage.
And what the heck is wrong with the rest of us? There isn’t a single other mainstream service whose workers face the same kind of routine danger - all due to a lack of workplace regulation and oversight. With a workforce that’s at least 90 per cent female, it would be tough to find a more pressing women’s issue.
Yet time and again, the decades-old debate fizzles out with pious musings about the need to prevent exploitation and violence against women. And nothing changes.
We pay a terrible price on a number of fronts. Children continue to suffer in an industry that we completely ignore. Adult Canadians labour in profoundly unsafe conditions. Neighbourhoods break down under the wear and tear of hosting the local prostitution stroll.
I’m still fuming over the Canadian Labour Congress’s dismissal of this issue as one that its members are too “divided” on for the congress to take action. I would have thought workers’ rights trumped moral judgment. Who are we to judge how someone earns a living - especially when our own brothers, sons, friends and lovers are the buyers?
Our paralysis is tragic. Conditions are worsening, and all we do is continue to dither over whose ideology has it right. Unbearable.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Friday, April 13, 2007
Letter from Prague
April 13, 2007
His name is Alin. I’ll likely never know much more than that about him.
I had come to Prague on holiday, initially without much thought of seeing how the other side lives in that beautiful city. But having heard news of a refitted barge Prague was testing as a shelter for homeless people, I grew curious to see it for myself during my visit to the city last week.
My partner and I first spotted the barge while on a boat tour along the Vltava River, which winds through the centre of Prague.
It matched the photo from an on-line Czech story about the project that I’d asked our bemused hotel clerk to print out for me, and bore the same name: Hermes. Docked in the river below a massive metronome the city had installed to replace a statue of Stalin, I figured the barge wouldn’t be too hard to find again on foot.
The big ship had something of a foreboding look to it when I made my way there a couple days later, as did the man on deck who gestured at me to leave as I made my way down the gangplank. I retreated to the street, eventually spotting Alin as he approached the barge.
Wearing the demeanor and the faded tattoos of someone who’d had a hard life, he seemed like the kind of fellow who might know a thing or two about a barge for the homeless. Neither of us could speak each other’s language, but we managed to settle into something of a conversation.
I pointed to the barge and asked if he slept there. Yes, but he didn’t want the man who had scared me off to see that I was talking to him. Yes, he’d be happy to pose for a picture, but not here. We walked out of sight of the man who Alin nervously called the “chef.”
I asked Alin how many people slept aboard the barge, counting on my fingers to convey my meaning. He pulled out an alarm clock from his backpack and slowly pointed to one number and then another: 68.
I learned later that the barge can actually hold 250 men and women. It opened as a shelter in February, after city council spent the equivalent of $1.3 million to refit the ship, which once travelled the waters between Prague and Hamburg.
People like Alin can sleep there for 20 korunas a night - about $1. On a balmy spring night, with a vast park just a couple staircases away across the street, maybe that fee gets in the way of a full house.
Or maybe it has more to do with the non-stop clatter of the high-speed motorway running alongside the river where the Hermes docks, or the pounding jackhammers from the bridge being renovated directly above. Alin shrugs, and I take his meaning: Nothing wrong with a bed on the barge, but nothing particularly right about it, either.
In Prague, some 6,000 to 10,000 people live homeless, left behind these past 18 years during the city’s massive post-Communist transformation.
Unlike Victoria, Prague still has some bad parts of town where it can hide its growing number of lost souls, out of sight of the international tourists who now flood its vibrant streets by the thousands. Had I not gone looking for the barge, the only visible evidence of social ills would have been a handful of prostrate beggars in the city’s Old Town and the occasional staggering, stumbling street drunk outside a Metro station.
But flourishing economies in cities like Prague, Berlin and London are fuelling the same kind of phenomenal real-estate growth that our region has seen. With even the slummiest of neighbourhoods now facing development pressures, homelessness won’t be invisible anywhere for much longer. Europe alone has more than 2.7 million people living homeless.
Alin and I could talk of none of this, of course. Enthusiastic gestures and pointing only get you so far. So once we’d walked far enough to avoid being seen by the man on the barge, Alin cheerfully posed for a picture, then scratched his palm in a last gesture that I clearly understood: Money, please.
I dug out some korunas, the equivalent of $10 or so. In exchange, he loaded me up with goods from his backpack - stolen, I suppose - that he indicated were for my children and husband.
An electronic sudoku game. A package of modelling clay. A wooden bird with a broken tail. A child’s jacket. A whiskey flask, whisper of spirits still intact. The broken alarm clock he and I had employed in our communications. I resisted all of it, but saw quickly that he interpreted my refusal as an insult.
My own backpack now bulging, we said our goodbyes, and I headed back to the shops at the heart of the city. Alin’s gifts in my pack triggered the anti-shoplifting devices in every store I tried to go in.
An apologetic young Czech security guard at the Bata store finally asked to empty my bag, then repacked it without a word and sent me on my way.
Monday, April 09, 2007
Waiting (and waiting) won't bring about change
April 6, 2007
The thing with government reports is that I very often agree with them, sometimes even wholeheartedly.
I’ve seen my share of reports in 25 years of journalism, a lot of them bang on. Royal commission reports are particularly insightful, their authors having put serious time into studying every facet of the problem at hand.
But the unfortunate truth of reports and royal commissions is that we tend to ignore them. We send our best fact-finders out on noble missions of getting to the root of what ails us, then leave their recommendations to gather dust.
Sure, there’s a flurry of interest when a report first comes out, and a genuine intent to follow through. Within a year, however, we’re already losing interest; at the two-year mark, most of us will have forgotten that there ever was a report, at least until some other report comes to the identical conclusions a decade or so later.
Aboriginals failing in school. Children in government care. A better life for people with mental illness. An improved health-care system. A better way to help our kids learn. I’d be hard-pressed to tally all the major Canadian studies I’ve seen come and go in the last couple of decades.
A lot of them were powerful calls for transformation. I sat nodding my head in emphatic agreement through page after page of reports like B.C.’s royal commissions on health and education, or the marvelous Tom Gove report on reforming the way we look after children in care.
Hardly surprising, I suppose. The way to solve a problem is to understand every facet of it, and that’s exactly what royal commissions and other big reports set out to do.
But why do we so rarely take their advice?
One of our primary problems is an inability to focus long enough on an issue to get the job done. Big issues take big solutions, not teeny-tiny strategies mapped out a year at a time.
We also let political parties hijack the public agenda. We end up talking about what the parties feel like talking about, which leaves us lurching from one disjointed strategy to another in the artificial four-year cycle created by our election process.
It’s a disastrous approach when it comes to complex problems requiring patience, support and vision to solve.
One moment, we’re inching closer to finally getting a grip on the ridiculous way we deal with addiction. The next, Vancouver’s safe-injection site is being threatened with closure and Victoria’s main needle exchange is being run out of town.
One day, we’re wiping away tears over some poor little sod killed while in government care. The next, it’s 10 anguished years later and we’re still crying.
I wish I could tell myself I’m just aging into cynicism. But I’ve read the reports, and gone on to live in the brand new world that was supposedly going to result from them. And for the most part, not much changes.
Our national paralysis has us frozen up on some pretty frightening fronts.
By never following through on what our own reports and royal commissions have told us, we’ve actively created the kinds of deep-rooted problems that our country used to be proud not to have. We’re following countries like the U.S. into a mire of social problems and overflowing prisons, and class-based systems of care and schooling.
The worst of it is that we’re walking straight into it, undeterred by the living example of flawed social strategies unfolding in the country just south of us. Their reports have told them to do things differently as well, of course, for many years. But they haven’t, and it shows.
Even 20 years ago, could we have imagined a day when U.S. children would be walking through metal detectors to make sure they weren’t carrying guns? Or when poor, rural Midwesterners in states like Missouri and Iowa would be cited as one of the risk groups for high rates of crystal-methamphetamine use? Isn’t that enough to tell us there’s a high price to pay for getting this stuff wrong?
What it underlines for me is that change won’t come from the top down. Our governments may write a nice report, but the push has to start coming from the people if we ever want to see real change. Shuffling down to the polling booth once every four years just isn’t going to do it.
Where to start?
Pick an issue that’s really bugging you, and go learn something new about it. Track down the series of reports that were almost certainly written about it, and figure out a way to act on whatever part of the solution is within your grasp. Like the late Jerry Garcia tried to tell us, we’ve got to do more than just grumble that “somebody ought to do something about that.”
Sure, they ought to. But they aren’t. So it’s going to have to be us.
April 6, 2007
The thing with government reports is that I very often agree with them, sometimes even wholeheartedly.
I’ve seen my share of reports in 25 years of journalism, a lot of them bang on. Royal commission reports are particularly insightful, their authors having put serious time into studying every facet of the problem at hand.
But the unfortunate truth of reports and royal commissions is that we tend to ignore them. We send our best fact-finders out on noble missions of getting to the root of what ails us, then leave their recommendations to gather dust.
Sure, there’s a flurry of interest when a report first comes out, and a genuine intent to follow through. Within a year, however, we’re already losing interest; at the two-year mark, most of us will have forgotten that there ever was a report, at least until some other report comes to the identical conclusions a decade or so later.
Aboriginals failing in school. Children in government care. A better life for people with mental illness. An improved health-care system. A better way to help our kids learn. I’d be hard-pressed to tally all the major Canadian studies I’ve seen come and go in the last couple of decades.
A lot of them were powerful calls for transformation. I sat nodding my head in emphatic agreement through page after page of reports like B.C.’s royal commissions on health and education, or the marvelous Tom Gove report on reforming the way we look after children in care.
Hardly surprising, I suppose. The way to solve a problem is to understand every facet of it, and that’s exactly what royal commissions and other big reports set out to do.
But why do we so rarely take their advice?
One of our primary problems is an inability to focus long enough on an issue to get the job done. Big issues take big solutions, not teeny-tiny strategies mapped out a year at a time.
We also let political parties hijack the public agenda. We end up talking about what the parties feel like talking about, which leaves us lurching from one disjointed strategy to another in the artificial four-year cycle created by our election process.
It’s a disastrous approach when it comes to complex problems requiring patience, support and vision to solve.
One moment, we’re inching closer to finally getting a grip on the ridiculous way we deal with addiction. The next, Vancouver’s safe-injection site is being threatened with closure and Victoria’s main needle exchange is being run out of town.
One day, we’re wiping away tears over some poor little sod killed while in government care. The next, it’s 10 anguished years later and we’re still crying.
I wish I could tell myself I’m just aging into cynicism. But I’ve read the reports, and gone on to live in the brand new world that was supposedly going to result from them. And for the most part, not much changes.
Our national paralysis has us frozen up on some pretty frightening fronts.
By never following through on what our own reports and royal commissions have told us, we’ve actively created the kinds of deep-rooted problems that our country used to be proud not to have. We’re following countries like the U.S. into a mire of social problems and overflowing prisons, and class-based systems of care and schooling.
The worst of it is that we’re walking straight into it, undeterred by the living example of flawed social strategies unfolding in the country just south of us. Their reports have told them to do things differently as well, of course, for many years. But they haven’t, and it shows.
Even 20 years ago, could we have imagined a day when U.S. children would be walking through metal detectors to make sure they weren’t carrying guns? Or when poor, rural Midwesterners in states like Missouri and Iowa would be cited as one of the risk groups for high rates of crystal-methamphetamine use? Isn’t that enough to tell us there’s a high price to pay for getting this stuff wrong?
What it underlines for me is that change won’t come from the top down. Our governments may write a nice report, but the push has to start coming from the people if we ever want to see real change. Shuffling down to the polling booth once every four years just isn’t going to do it.
Where to start?
Pick an issue that’s really bugging you, and go learn something new about it. Track down the series of reports that were almost certainly written about it, and figure out a way to act on whatever part of the solution is within your grasp. Like the late Jerry Garcia tried to tell us, we’ve got to do more than just grumble that “somebody ought to do something about that.”
Sure, they ought to. But they aren’t. So it’s going to have to be us.
True tolerance much deeper than word choice
March 30, 2007
While there’s something charming about New York City’s new ban on the use of the “n-word,” the problem is that those who want to say ugly things will just find a new word.
Most recently it’s been former Seinfeld star Michael Richards wearing it for using the word, which he hurled with considerable racist invective at some poor black guy who heckled him during one of his comedy performances a few months ago. In the ensuing fallout, New York City decided to ban the n-word altogether.
A nice show of brotherhood. But if a community really wants to fix the problem that Richards’ rant brought to light, it takes getting at the underlying reasons for why people are so quickly given to judgment and hatred.
The words being used? They come and go, barely mattering in the grand scheme of things.
The hurtful words my mother once endured due to being half-Chinese were endlessly variable, and were valued by those who used them for their ability to wound.
So it wouldn’t have helped her to live in a town where “chink” was banned (sorry, Mom), because the people who wanted to put her down would have merely pulled some other term from the air to make her feel small, shamed and different. Words were just the way to deliver the message.
The latest invective making headlines is “faggot,” which is apparently undergoing something of a resurgence among those who never quite signed on to the gay-rights movement.
All of a sudden, TV stars are hurling the term at co-workers, and tiresome U.S. commentator Ann Coulter is tossing it around in her public addresses.
As discouraging as it is to hear that people are still making comments like that without so much as a wince, the debate around word use is at least stirring up some discussion around the racism and homophobia at the root of the name-calling.
That’s where we want to be putting our attention.
The thing about name-calling is that it’s much harder to do once you know and like somebody who fits in the category. You’re not likely to call your gay friend a faggot, unless you’re gay yourself.
(Pejoratives used by “insiders” are more about being in the club, not about trying to put a person down.)
As a kid, for instance, it was easy for me to join everybody else in speculating on the “retards” who took classes in some distant wing far away from the rest of us. But then my class spent some time teaching those same kids how to play the recorder, and I got to know the people at the other end of that label.
And that was that. I suspect it would go that way most times if we had the chance to get to know each other as people. Ultimately, that’s the challenge: To open ourselves to meeting people who aren’t like us, and seeing how very much like us they actually are.
Doing something about that hasn’t exactly been a government priority in the last few years anywhere in North America. I can’t remember the last time I saw a campaign pitching diversity and tolerance with any more depth than a Benetton ad, or a public undertaking aimed at bridging the cultural gaps that separate us.
Homophobia in particular has yet to have its day, which I guess is how you end up with some retired U.S. basketball player musing on-air about how he’d like to see all homosexuals removed from the world.
Could he have possibly made such an outlandish comment if he’d known some of the people he was talking about - or at least been aware of how many gay people he probably already knows and likes?
So if we’re calling people names these days, perhaps it’s because we don’t have a clue about each other. We’re busy sorting people based on skin type, sexual preference, and skewed news coverage that leaves us suspecting that all Muslims are potential terrorists, and all aboriginals unemployed and incompetent.
Banning the n-word or any other pejorative can never get at that. No, that one’s going to have to be about getting beyond our significant cultural divides. Canada has prided itself on its multiculturalism, but the truth is that our country badly needs a long-term strategy to keep our many solitudes unified and respectful of each other.
Folkfest was one such tiny opportunity in our own community.
The demise of the annual event this year, and the Latin Music Festival as well, signals a loss of much more than interesting music and good food. Such events were among the few to draw people from across a wide cultural experience to celebrate each other’s differences.
Getting at racism, homophobia and all those other “isms” comes down to sharing common experience. Ugly words will stop when we get to the root of why we use them.
March 30, 2007
While there’s something charming about New York City’s new ban on the use of the “n-word,” the problem is that those who want to say ugly things will just find a new word.
Most recently it’s been former Seinfeld star Michael Richards wearing it for using the word, which he hurled with considerable racist invective at some poor black guy who heckled him during one of his comedy performances a few months ago. In the ensuing fallout, New York City decided to ban the n-word altogether.
A nice show of brotherhood. But if a community really wants to fix the problem that Richards’ rant brought to light, it takes getting at the underlying reasons for why people are so quickly given to judgment and hatred.
The words being used? They come and go, barely mattering in the grand scheme of things.
The hurtful words my mother once endured due to being half-Chinese were endlessly variable, and were valued by those who used them for their ability to wound.
So it wouldn’t have helped her to live in a town where “chink” was banned (sorry, Mom), because the people who wanted to put her down would have merely pulled some other term from the air to make her feel small, shamed and different. Words were just the way to deliver the message.
The latest invective making headlines is “faggot,” which is apparently undergoing something of a resurgence among those who never quite signed on to the gay-rights movement.
All of a sudden, TV stars are hurling the term at co-workers, and tiresome U.S. commentator Ann Coulter is tossing it around in her public addresses.
As discouraging as it is to hear that people are still making comments like that without so much as a wince, the debate around word use is at least stirring up some discussion around the racism and homophobia at the root of the name-calling.
That’s where we want to be putting our attention.
The thing about name-calling is that it’s much harder to do once you know and like somebody who fits in the category. You’re not likely to call your gay friend a faggot, unless you’re gay yourself.
(Pejoratives used by “insiders” are more about being in the club, not about trying to put a person down.)
As a kid, for instance, it was easy for me to join everybody else in speculating on the “retards” who took classes in some distant wing far away from the rest of us. But then my class spent some time teaching those same kids how to play the recorder, and I got to know the people at the other end of that label.
And that was that. I suspect it would go that way most times if we had the chance to get to know each other as people. Ultimately, that’s the challenge: To open ourselves to meeting people who aren’t like us, and seeing how very much like us they actually are.
Doing something about that hasn’t exactly been a government priority in the last few years anywhere in North America. I can’t remember the last time I saw a campaign pitching diversity and tolerance with any more depth than a Benetton ad, or a public undertaking aimed at bridging the cultural gaps that separate us.
Homophobia in particular has yet to have its day, which I guess is how you end up with some retired U.S. basketball player musing on-air about how he’d like to see all homosexuals removed from the world.
Could he have possibly made such an outlandish comment if he’d known some of the people he was talking about - or at least been aware of how many gay people he probably already knows and likes?
So if we’re calling people names these days, perhaps it’s because we don’t have a clue about each other. We’re busy sorting people based on skin type, sexual preference, and skewed news coverage that leaves us suspecting that all Muslims are potential terrorists, and all aboriginals unemployed and incompetent.
Banning the n-word or any other pejorative can never get at that. No, that one’s going to have to be about getting beyond our significant cultural divides. Canada has prided itself on its multiculturalism, but the truth is that our country badly needs a long-term strategy to keep our many solitudes unified and respectful of each other.
Folkfest was one such tiny opportunity in our own community.
The demise of the annual event this year, and the Latin Music Festival as well, signals a loss of much more than interesting music and good food. Such events were among the few to draw people from across a wide cultural experience to celebrate each other’s differences.
Getting at racism, homophobia and all those other “isms” comes down to sharing common experience. Ugly words will stop when we get to the root of why we use them.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
B.C.'s homeless strategy is all talk and little action
March 23, 2007
We’ll leave it to Arn Van Iersel to weigh in with the lowdown on how things are going with the province’s three-year-old homelessness initiative.
The acting auditor general is going to be reviewing the initiative to see whether it has been effective. But if Victoria’s downtown in that period is any measure, I’d have to guess the news from Van Iersel won’t be good.
It won’t be all bad, of course. Almost 1,300 units of subsidized and supported housing have been given the go-ahead since the launch of the 2004 strategy. And at least Port Alberni has a mental- health outreach worker, as promised to B.C. communities under the initiative but so far in place in barely a handful of towns.
Virtually any kind of affordable-housing initiative is a blessing in these unsettling times, marked at one end by the grim realities of nearly 800 people living on our streets, and at the other by sky-high housing prices that squeeze the rental market.
In our region, almost 1,200 people are homeless or very close to it. Thousands more are scratching by in sub-par housing, at least until the health authorities or the landlord show up to shut the place down.
So 1,300 units of affordable housing province-wide may be laudable, but it barely scratches the surface. Rent top-ups to working families earning less than $20,000 a year are great too, but doesn’t do a thing for people at the very bottom.
I’ve been close to the street scene through my non-profit work for the entire three years that there has been a homelessness initiative. All I’ve seen is worsening problems.
You know those gloomy media stories about homelessness and addiction that you’d rather not read because they bum you out? I’m hear to tell you that they’ve got nothing on the real thing. The growing violence, the increase in street prostitution, the infections and overdoses and assorted daily tragedies of life on the streets - it’s all unbearably sad, and all the more so because it’s so completely unnecessary.
Can we live with knowing that pregnant women are living on our streets? That they give birth to embattled babies whose own young lives are then begun in foster homes and state care?
Probably not, at least in theory. In reality, a dozen or more such pregnant women are living on our downtown streets at any given time. Their children know disadvantage and poverty before they’re ever born, and many start out their tiny lives fighting the drugs and alcohol that ravaged them prenatally.
The government apparently believes that between a quarter and a third of people on our streets are mentally ill. I think they’d be wise to check those figures. Fortunately, it won’t take an expensive study or a royal commission or anything like that. A few hours hanging around the sidewalk outside Streetlink ought to do it.
Once upon a time, when B.C.’s big institutions closed down and disgorged people onto the streets, the solution might have been to get people some mental-health services and a cheap apartment.
But people with mental illnesses have been abandoned to the streets for too long now. They’ve got a way more complex set of problems, of which mental illness is only one. It’s going to take way more than 1,300 housing units and a handful of outreach workers to do something meaningful about that.
I spoke to a group of Grade 9-10 Parkland students a couple weeks ago about street issues, and it devastated me to realize that the region’s current street problems are seen as the norm among kids that age in our region. They’ve known nothing different.
I tried to tell them about how it had been in the “old days” - just 15 years ago, in fact, when Open Door clients comprised a small enough number that they fit comfortably in tiny digs above what is now the Metro Theatre.
These days, hundreds of people use the Open Door (now renamed Our Place). The little group of down-and-out men who made up the bulk of the region’s homeless population has transformed into a sprawling, brawling sub-class of almost 800 men, women and children, and hundreds more if you include the off-and-on homeless in the tally.
As tough as the challenges are due to our ongoing failure to act, the miseries of the street are within our capability to fix. We just need to solve the problem for what it is, and hopefully before it gets any bigger. If we applied even half the focus to addressing homelessness that we’re giving to staging the 2010 Olympics, we’d be operating at warp speed compared to the glacial pace of our actual progress.
Three years into B.C.’s homelessness initiative, we’ve gotten off to the smallest of starts. More, please - and very, very soon.
March 23, 2007
We’ll leave it to Arn Van Iersel to weigh in with the lowdown on how things are going with the province’s three-year-old homelessness initiative.
The acting auditor general is going to be reviewing the initiative to see whether it has been effective. But if Victoria’s downtown in that period is any measure, I’d have to guess the news from Van Iersel won’t be good.
It won’t be all bad, of course. Almost 1,300 units of subsidized and supported housing have been given the go-ahead since the launch of the 2004 strategy. And at least Port Alberni has a mental- health outreach worker, as promised to B.C. communities under the initiative but so far in place in barely a handful of towns.
Virtually any kind of affordable-housing initiative is a blessing in these unsettling times, marked at one end by the grim realities of nearly 800 people living on our streets, and at the other by sky-high housing prices that squeeze the rental market.
In our region, almost 1,200 people are homeless or very close to it. Thousands more are scratching by in sub-par housing, at least until the health authorities or the landlord show up to shut the place down.
So 1,300 units of affordable housing province-wide may be laudable, but it barely scratches the surface. Rent top-ups to working families earning less than $20,000 a year are great too, but doesn’t do a thing for people at the very bottom.
I’ve been close to the street scene through my non-profit work for the entire three years that there has been a homelessness initiative. All I’ve seen is worsening problems.
You know those gloomy media stories about homelessness and addiction that you’d rather not read because they bum you out? I’m hear to tell you that they’ve got nothing on the real thing. The growing violence, the increase in street prostitution, the infections and overdoses and assorted daily tragedies of life on the streets - it’s all unbearably sad, and all the more so because it’s so completely unnecessary.
Can we live with knowing that pregnant women are living on our streets? That they give birth to embattled babies whose own young lives are then begun in foster homes and state care?
Probably not, at least in theory. In reality, a dozen or more such pregnant women are living on our downtown streets at any given time. Their children know disadvantage and poverty before they’re ever born, and many start out their tiny lives fighting the drugs and alcohol that ravaged them prenatally.
The government apparently believes that between a quarter and a third of people on our streets are mentally ill. I think they’d be wise to check those figures. Fortunately, it won’t take an expensive study or a royal commission or anything like that. A few hours hanging around the sidewalk outside Streetlink ought to do it.
Once upon a time, when B.C.’s big institutions closed down and disgorged people onto the streets, the solution might have been to get people some mental-health services and a cheap apartment.
But people with mental illnesses have been abandoned to the streets for too long now. They’ve got a way more complex set of problems, of which mental illness is only one. It’s going to take way more than 1,300 housing units and a handful of outreach workers to do something meaningful about that.
I spoke to a group of Grade 9-10 Parkland students a couple weeks ago about street issues, and it devastated me to realize that the region’s current street problems are seen as the norm among kids that age in our region. They’ve known nothing different.
I tried to tell them about how it had been in the “old days” - just 15 years ago, in fact, when Open Door clients comprised a small enough number that they fit comfortably in tiny digs above what is now the Metro Theatre.
These days, hundreds of people use the Open Door (now renamed Our Place). The little group of down-and-out men who made up the bulk of the region’s homeless population has transformed into a sprawling, brawling sub-class of almost 800 men, women and children, and hundreds more if you include the off-and-on homeless in the tally.
As tough as the challenges are due to our ongoing failure to act, the miseries of the street are within our capability to fix. We just need to solve the problem for what it is, and hopefully before it gets any bigger. If we applied even half the focus to addressing homelessness that we’re giving to staging the 2010 Olympics, we’d be operating at warp speed compared to the glacial pace of our actual progress.
Three years into B.C.’s homelessness initiative, we’ve gotten off to the smallest of starts. More, please - and very, very soon.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
If only teen pregnancy was as easy as more birth control
March 16, 2007
I’m rooting for Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, and for anyone else who sets out to address the way we care for the 10,000 children in government care.
But the first challenge is to start thinking differently about the problem. And that means letting go of preconceived notions - like the one about how teen pregnancy will be solved with sex education and birth control.
As the province’s new representative for children and youth, Turpel-Lafond has the opportunity to do some powerful work over the next five years on behalf of the tragic figures caught up in B.C.’s troubled family-care system. And she’s right that it’s a heck of an indicator when girls in care in our province are four times more likely to get pregnant than other girls.
I just hope she goes deeper into that issue than her musings last week around whether children in care were getting enough sex education and birth control. If only it were that simple.
Sure, girls in care probably don’t get enough of either of those. But all the sex ed and birth control in the world can’t get to the heart of the complicated reasons for teenage pregnancy.
The question is simple enough: Why would modern-day North American girls continue to get pregnant in these sexually saturated, birth-controlled times? Perhaps because the underlying reason has nothing to do with knowing how to prevent a pregnancy.
Teenagers have, of course, always gotten pregnant. As a teenage mom myself, I can’t help but bristle at the popular notion that nothing good comes from early motherhood.
What has changed since my time, however, is an end to societal expectations that young men should take some responsibility for that.
Nowadays, girls are pretty much on their own. Modern teen pregnancy has thus become synonymous with poverty, failure and struggle. But virtually all of us have teenage mothers in our own family backgrounds from the days when it was accepted and supported.
So part of what has to happen is just plain old support. If boys are no longer to be held to any expectation around support for the girls they get pregnant, then somebody else has to help make that happen.
On some theoretical level, I think that’s supposed to be government’s job, but I’ve seen little evidence of that to this point. While pregnant girls from financially stable families do OK under the new world order, girls from struggling, marginal families - or worse, from the shattered world of government care - can barely catch a break in these mean times.
It’s within our reach to do something about that virtually immediately, and we ought to. Nothing good comes from leaving pregnant girls and women to scratch by on a $500 welfare cheque. If we’re serious about doing something to slow the rising tide of broken people in our communities, one of the most vital populations to care for is pregnant women.
But teenage pregnancy is also about hope, and it’s that truth that I suspect will pose the biggest challenges in reducing high pregnancy rates among girls in care.
For those girls, getting pregnant is about creating somebody to love them just as they are. It’s about the dream of what it would feel like to have a family - something that many will have barely experienced. It’s about a new tomorrow, in a different and happier life.
Pregnancy for a kid growing up in struggling circumstance rarely turns out as happy as that, of course. But that’s where a girl’s heart leads her sometimes when there’s nothing else to hold onto. Preventing her pregnancy as a teenager is really about helping her feel loved, connected and supported as a child.
Trying to accomplish that under the current system of care in B.C. would be a monumental task, but hardly an unfamiliar one.
After all, tens of thousands of healthy families out there know exactly what it takes to ensure their own children don’t end up as single moms on a welfare cheque. Fewer girls in care will get pregnant when the system more closely models the attributes of a real family - not an easy transformation.
But here’s the good news: We’re doing things so poorly now, there’s nowhere to go but up. With Turpel-Lafond’s recent appointment, we have an opportunity to open up a conversation with the children and families entangled in our care system and figure out how to do it better.
It needn’t be an impossible undertaking. Every day, in every community in Canada, people are capably raising their children into healthy adulthood.
Surely it’s within our ability to design a system that recreates those same family models for struggling families and their children, building trust between child welfare workers and families rather than pitting them against each other.
So yes, let’s get those poor kids in care some more birth control. But first let’s try to give them a real family.
March 16, 2007
I’m rooting for Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, and for anyone else who sets out to address the way we care for the 10,000 children in government care.
But the first challenge is to start thinking differently about the problem. And that means letting go of preconceived notions - like the one about how teen pregnancy will be solved with sex education and birth control.
As the province’s new representative for children and youth, Turpel-Lafond has the opportunity to do some powerful work over the next five years on behalf of the tragic figures caught up in B.C.’s troubled family-care system. And she’s right that it’s a heck of an indicator when girls in care in our province are four times more likely to get pregnant than other girls.
I just hope she goes deeper into that issue than her musings last week around whether children in care were getting enough sex education and birth control. If only it were that simple.
Sure, girls in care probably don’t get enough of either of those. But all the sex ed and birth control in the world can’t get to the heart of the complicated reasons for teenage pregnancy.
The question is simple enough: Why would modern-day North American girls continue to get pregnant in these sexually saturated, birth-controlled times? Perhaps because the underlying reason has nothing to do with knowing how to prevent a pregnancy.
Teenagers have, of course, always gotten pregnant. As a teenage mom myself, I can’t help but bristle at the popular notion that nothing good comes from early motherhood.
What has changed since my time, however, is an end to societal expectations that young men should take some responsibility for that.
Nowadays, girls are pretty much on their own. Modern teen pregnancy has thus become synonymous with poverty, failure and struggle. But virtually all of us have teenage mothers in our own family backgrounds from the days when it was accepted and supported.
So part of what has to happen is just plain old support. If boys are no longer to be held to any expectation around support for the girls they get pregnant, then somebody else has to help make that happen.
On some theoretical level, I think that’s supposed to be government’s job, but I’ve seen little evidence of that to this point. While pregnant girls from financially stable families do OK under the new world order, girls from struggling, marginal families - or worse, from the shattered world of government care - can barely catch a break in these mean times.
It’s within our reach to do something about that virtually immediately, and we ought to. Nothing good comes from leaving pregnant girls and women to scratch by on a $500 welfare cheque. If we’re serious about doing something to slow the rising tide of broken people in our communities, one of the most vital populations to care for is pregnant women.
But teenage pregnancy is also about hope, and it’s that truth that I suspect will pose the biggest challenges in reducing high pregnancy rates among girls in care.
For those girls, getting pregnant is about creating somebody to love them just as they are. It’s about the dream of what it would feel like to have a family - something that many will have barely experienced. It’s about a new tomorrow, in a different and happier life.
Pregnancy for a kid growing up in struggling circumstance rarely turns out as happy as that, of course. But that’s where a girl’s heart leads her sometimes when there’s nothing else to hold onto. Preventing her pregnancy as a teenager is really about helping her feel loved, connected and supported as a child.
Trying to accomplish that under the current system of care in B.C. would be a monumental task, but hardly an unfamiliar one.
After all, tens of thousands of healthy families out there know exactly what it takes to ensure their own children don’t end up as single moms on a welfare cheque. Fewer girls in care will get pregnant when the system more closely models the attributes of a real family - not an easy transformation.
But here’s the good news: We’re doing things so poorly now, there’s nowhere to go but up. With Turpel-Lafond’s recent appointment, we have an opportunity to open up a conversation with the children and families entangled in our care system and figure out how to do it better.
It needn’t be an impossible undertaking. Every day, in every community in Canada, people are capably raising their children into healthy adulthood.
Surely it’s within our ability to design a system that recreates those same family models for struggling families and their children, building trust between child welfare workers and families rather than pitting them against each other.
So yes, let’s get those poor kids in care some more birth control. But first let’s try to give them a real family.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
It all comes out in the wash
March 9, 2007
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
March 9, 2007
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Restaurant calorie counts a weighty subject
March 2, 2007
In this time of angst over how fat we’re all getting, the only real villain to this point has been our own gluttonous selves. Nobody’s out there making us eat too much.
And for the most part, that’s true. If people are putting on weight to the point that it’s having an impact on their health, then it’s up to them to do something about that. We have the right to good health care no matter what bad choices we make, but we still need to take personal responsibility for staying healthy.
That said, the astounding figures in a U.S. health organization’s newsletter this month certainly underline the restaurant industry’s significant role in helping North Americans lard on the pounds. We may be eating the stuff, but it’s the industry that has cranked up the calorie count to truly obscene levels.
The restaurants listed in the March newsletter of the Centre for Science in the Public Interest were all American, but I don’t imagine the results would be that different in Canada. The study looked at six mid-range, family-style chain restaurants, and we have no shortage of those.
The dish that clocked in with the highest number of calories was a chicken and broccoli pasta from the Ruby’s chain. The dish had 2,060 calories - almost 100 calories more than what an average woman needs for an entire day. And that’s just one meal.
A burger from a different chain racked up 1,940 calories. No fries, no pop, no nothing - just a burger. The amount of fat in both the burger and the pasta was obscene: 128 grams for the pasta; 141 grams for the burger. That’s the equivalent of almost three-quarters of a cup of butter.
Could you have imagined a single burger incorporating the equivalent amount of fat as three-quarters of a cup of butter? Probably not, and there’s the rub. We simply have no idea of what we’re being served.
Staggering calorie counts are presumably not the norm at most restaurants, and many are downright healthful. But can you say that for sure about the places where you eat? That favourite pasta dish you regularly dig into at your restaurant of choice - have you got any idea how many calories are in it?
The places surveyed by the CSPI all had nutritional breakdowns available for their main dishes. They provided the information to the CSPI for its study, and would likely provide it to me or you as well if we could identify the right people to ask.
But that same information isn’t posted in their restaurants. The eateries said they didn’t want to confuse customers, given that menus change and people tend to customize their meals.
Recognized. But restaurants generally have a stable of steady dishes and sides that they serve. It’s hardly pushy of us to want to know what’s in them. When burgers start tipping the scales with the fat equivalent of three-quarters of a cup of butter, the public has a right to know.
Changing bad habits starts with education. And that means knowing what we’re eating. While nobody would benefit from some nightmarish new regulation requiring restaurants to feature all nutritional breakdowns on every changeable dish they serve, perhaps we could at least require that restaurants post details of their standard fare.
Some of the fast-food places are already posting their nutritional information, and I think it will make a difference over time.
Some of us will walk out of the door forever after being jolted by the calorie counts. Some will stay, but will choose the burger with slightly fewer calories, or the lunch without the fries and the mega-pop. And sure, some will carry on as usual, but at least they won’t be able to claim ignorance when the pounds start piling on.
More and more I see the parallels between our tobacco addiction of days gone by, and our modern-day food compulsions. Nicotine is addictive, but the same can be said of dietary fats and sugars once they’ve been torqued into the raison d’être of our food pursuits. Someone really had to put in effort to create a single burger laden with more fat than a person should be consuming in five days of eating.
So on the one hand, those who eat too much are indeed their own worst enemies. On the other, restaurant fare is in some cases scoring so high on the fat, sugar and salt scale that you have to wonder about the industry’s role as clever alchemist, happy to fuel our feeding frenzy with an overdose of high-calorie flavour.
Eat 500 calories more than you burn every day, and you’ll put on a pound in a week. You’ll need to run for almost an hour every day to burn off those same 500 calories. If you could easily find the details of every dish you ate, you’d almost certainly make some different choices.
Ask the restaurants that you frequent to make those details readily available to everyone. We can’t eat smart without it.
March 2, 2007
In this time of angst over how fat we’re all getting, the only real villain to this point has been our own gluttonous selves. Nobody’s out there making us eat too much.
And for the most part, that’s true. If people are putting on weight to the point that it’s having an impact on their health, then it’s up to them to do something about that. We have the right to good health care no matter what bad choices we make, but we still need to take personal responsibility for staying healthy.
That said, the astounding figures in a U.S. health organization’s newsletter this month certainly underline the restaurant industry’s significant role in helping North Americans lard on the pounds. We may be eating the stuff, but it’s the industry that has cranked up the calorie count to truly obscene levels.
The restaurants listed in the March newsletter of the Centre for Science in the Public Interest were all American, but I don’t imagine the results would be that different in Canada. The study looked at six mid-range, family-style chain restaurants, and we have no shortage of those.
The dish that clocked in with the highest number of calories was a chicken and broccoli pasta from the Ruby’s chain. The dish had 2,060 calories - almost 100 calories more than what an average woman needs for an entire day. And that’s just one meal.
A burger from a different chain racked up 1,940 calories. No fries, no pop, no nothing - just a burger. The amount of fat in both the burger and the pasta was obscene: 128 grams for the pasta; 141 grams for the burger. That’s the equivalent of almost three-quarters of a cup of butter.
Could you have imagined a single burger incorporating the equivalent amount of fat as three-quarters of a cup of butter? Probably not, and there’s the rub. We simply have no idea of what we’re being served.
Staggering calorie counts are presumably not the norm at most restaurants, and many are downright healthful. But can you say that for sure about the places where you eat? That favourite pasta dish you regularly dig into at your restaurant of choice - have you got any idea how many calories are in it?
The places surveyed by the CSPI all had nutritional breakdowns available for their main dishes. They provided the information to the CSPI for its study, and would likely provide it to me or you as well if we could identify the right people to ask.
But that same information isn’t posted in their restaurants. The eateries said they didn’t want to confuse customers, given that menus change and people tend to customize their meals.
Recognized. But restaurants generally have a stable of steady dishes and sides that they serve. It’s hardly pushy of us to want to know what’s in them. When burgers start tipping the scales with the fat equivalent of three-quarters of a cup of butter, the public has a right to know.
Changing bad habits starts with education. And that means knowing what we’re eating. While nobody would benefit from some nightmarish new regulation requiring restaurants to feature all nutritional breakdowns on every changeable dish they serve, perhaps we could at least require that restaurants post details of their standard fare.
Some of the fast-food places are already posting their nutritional information, and I think it will make a difference over time.
Some of us will walk out of the door forever after being jolted by the calorie counts. Some will stay, but will choose the burger with slightly fewer calories, or the lunch without the fries and the mega-pop. And sure, some will carry on as usual, but at least they won’t be able to claim ignorance when the pounds start piling on.
More and more I see the parallels between our tobacco addiction of days gone by, and our modern-day food compulsions. Nicotine is addictive, but the same can be said of dietary fats and sugars once they’ve been torqued into the raison d’être of our food pursuits. Someone really had to put in effort to create a single burger laden with more fat than a person should be consuming in five days of eating.
So on the one hand, those who eat too much are indeed their own worst enemies. On the other, restaurant fare is in some cases scoring so high on the fat, sugar and salt scale that you have to wonder about the industry’s role as clever alchemist, happy to fuel our feeding frenzy with an overdose of high-calorie flavour.
Eat 500 calories more than you burn every day, and you’ll put on a pound in a week. You’ll need to run for almost an hour every day to burn off those same 500 calories. If you could easily find the details of every dish you ate, you’d almost certainly make some different choices.
Ask the restaurants that you frequent to make those details readily available to everyone. We can’t eat smart without it.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Hard to stay positive when faced with our inability to act
Feb. 23, 2007
Life on the front lines of a load of social issues these past three years has underlined for me the problems of a community that can’t come to grips with what’s going on in its streets.
It’s been something of a grim awakening.
Not the issues so much - 23 years in journalism had already introduced me to things like drug addiction, the sex trade and people living on the streets before I started working in the not-for-profit sector in 2004.
No, it’s my newfound knowledge - that we’re paralyzed with indecision about what to do about any of it - that has proved the most unsettling.
I sometimes fear I’m drifting into cynicism, which was certainly a risk even in my previous job as a journalist. On that front, I remain haunted by the ghost of the Victoria Health Project of the late 1980s.
I was a relatively new reporter in those days, and loved the strategy for its common sense. Tasked with finding a way to keep aging people out of hospital when they didn’t need to be there, the project figured it out with a variety of strategies ranging from helping seniors with their household chores to developing mobile psychiatric care.
Yet less than a decade later, I checked back into the story and found the whole concept behind the project had been erased from the collective memory, to the point that the original problems had returned and the identical strategies were being talked about as if they’d never been tried.
I eventually lost count of the number of good initiatives that suffered a similar fate. It turns out we have a discouraging habit of identifying a problem, attempting a solution, cutting the funding before change can really take root, then reidentifying the same problem a few years on and doing it all over again.
Nothing positive comes from cynicism, that’s the truth. But boy, it’s waiting for you once you start paying attention to how little actually gets done about our most pressing problems.
It’s probably been close to a decade since I walked through Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and realized it had reached the point where reclamation seemed an impossible dream.
Vacant and boarded-up buildings lined the streets. The handful of businesses still struggling to stay open couldn’t lure customers into the area. Sick and desperate people manouevered the sidewalks like drugged-out, heartbreaking zombies.
I was struck at the time by how fortunate Victoria was to have escaped a similar fate. To see a wonderful city like Vancouver with such devastation at its core is tragic.
But that visit of mine was a long time ago, and Victoria has lost considerable ground in the intervening years. We are not yet the Downtown Eastside, but neither are we even close to the healthy city we used to be.
We have real problems. If we can’t fix them, they will grow into profound ones. That’s the unassailable lesson of the Downtown Eastside, and one that we ignore at our peril.
Like the Downtown Eastside, the reasons for Victoria’s urban problems start with the closing of B.C.’s big institutions in the 1980s, and carry on through global economic shifts, the virtual end of social housing, cheap and readily available street drugs, relentless cuts to all social supports, and an equally relentless refusal to believe any of this is happening.
Add in the tendency of one troubled family to beget many, and you get the picture.
But homelessness need not be a condition of our times. Drug addiction and mental illness can be dealt with. Yes, we’ve left things a little late, but a better world for all is still within our reach.
How will the work be done? As always, one person at a time.
Were we to just get on with it, there could be a happy ending for everybody. We already know what it takes, and in some cases are already doing it. We just need to do much, much more, for as long as it takes to reach the point where we can see the difference in our healthy, happy downtowns.
Research typically shows that setting people up with the help they need costs virtually the same - and sometimes much less - as leaving them to rattle around in their personal disasters. But even if it cost more, it’s surely worth our while to fix our urban malaise regardless.
Why can’t we act? Perhaps it has to do with a culture that holds people responsible for getting out from under their own messes. I get the importance of the principle, but what we’re seeing in our downtown is how life turns out for the folks who just can’t make that happen. How long are we prepared to stand on principle?
Once upon a time, I would have thought that a wealthy, privileged city would stop at nothing to save its beautiful core from becoming just another disturbing example of failed social policy and inaction.
On my good days, I still do.
Feb. 23, 2007
Life on the front lines of a load of social issues these past three years has underlined for me the problems of a community that can’t come to grips with what’s going on in its streets.
It’s been something of a grim awakening.
Not the issues so much - 23 years in journalism had already introduced me to things like drug addiction, the sex trade and people living on the streets before I started working in the not-for-profit sector in 2004.
No, it’s my newfound knowledge - that we’re paralyzed with indecision about what to do about any of it - that has proved the most unsettling.
I sometimes fear I’m drifting into cynicism, which was certainly a risk even in my previous job as a journalist. On that front, I remain haunted by the ghost of the Victoria Health Project of the late 1980s.
I was a relatively new reporter in those days, and loved the strategy for its common sense. Tasked with finding a way to keep aging people out of hospital when they didn’t need to be there, the project figured it out with a variety of strategies ranging from helping seniors with their household chores to developing mobile psychiatric care.
Yet less than a decade later, I checked back into the story and found the whole concept behind the project had been erased from the collective memory, to the point that the original problems had returned and the identical strategies were being talked about as if they’d never been tried.
I eventually lost count of the number of good initiatives that suffered a similar fate. It turns out we have a discouraging habit of identifying a problem, attempting a solution, cutting the funding before change can really take root, then reidentifying the same problem a few years on and doing it all over again.
Nothing positive comes from cynicism, that’s the truth. But boy, it’s waiting for you once you start paying attention to how little actually gets done about our most pressing problems.
It’s probably been close to a decade since I walked through Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and realized it had reached the point where reclamation seemed an impossible dream.
Vacant and boarded-up buildings lined the streets. The handful of businesses still struggling to stay open couldn’t lure customers into the area. Sick and desperate people manouevered the sidewalks like drugged-out, heartbreaking zombies.
I was struck at the time by how fortunate Victoria was to have escaped a similar fate. To see a wonderful city like Vancouver with such devastation at its core is tragic.
But that visit of mine was a long time ago, and Victoria has lost considerable ground in the intervening years. We are not yet the Downtown Eastside, but neither are we even close to the healthy city we used to be.
We have real problems. If we can’t fix them, they will grow into profound ones. That’s the unassailable lesson of the Downtown Eastside, and one that we ignore at our peril.
Like the Downtown Eastside, the reasons for Victoria’s urban problems start with the closing of B.C.’s big institutions in the 1980s, and carry on through global economic shifts, the virtual end of social housing, cheap and readily available street drugs, relentless cuts to all social supports, and an equally relentless refusal to believe any of this is happening.
Add in the tendency of one troubled family to beget many, and you get the picture.
But homelessness need not be a condition of our times. Drug addiction and mental illness can be dealt with. Yes, we’ve left things a little late, but a better world for all is still within our reach.
How will the work be done? As always, one person at a time.
Were we to just get on with it, there could be a happy ending for everybody. We already know what it takes, and in some cases are already doing it. We just need to do much, much more, for as long as it takes to reach the point where we can see the difference in our healthy, happy downtowns.
Research typically shows that setting people up with the help they need costs virtually the same - and sometimes much less - as leaving them to rattle around in their personal disasters. But even if it cost more, it’s surely worth our while to fix our urban malaise regardless.
Why can’t we act? Perhaps it has to do with a culture that holds people responsible for getting out from under their own messes. I get the importance of the principle, but what we’re seeing in our downtown is how life turns out for the folks who just can’t make that happen. How long are we prepared to stand on principle?
Once upon a time, I would have thought that a wealthy, privileged city would stop at nothing to save its beautiful core from becoming just another disturbing example of failed social policy and inaction.
On my good days, I still do.
Monday, February 19, 2007
If exotic dancers' money not good enough, don't count on mine
Feb . 17, 2007
When I first heard about a national breast cancer charity turning down a donation from exotic dancers in Vancouver, I got mad. I fired off a furious e-mail to the Breast Cancer Society of Canada, and suspect a lot of other people did too.
Being an exotic dancer is, after all, a legal profession. Up until 2004, Canada even had a special fast-track immigration category for exotic dancers to ensure the country never ran short of them.
Do we want our charities getting sniffy about taking donations from hard-working, fully legal dancers just because somebody disapproves of how they make a living? That’s what happened in this instance, when the cancer society rejected the proceeds of a fundraiser being put on by Vancouver’s Exotic Dancers For Canada next month.
But while I was poking around on the Web in search of insight into what could have possibly possessed the society to refuse the donation, what became obvious was that the same kind of thing happens all the time. Exotic dancers in particular have had a hard time of it.
The Windsor Star had a story about exotic dancers back in 1984 who tried to donate half of a night’s wages to charity. The local United Way wouldn’t take it, and the dancers finally ended up giving the $3,000 to a Windsor hospice.
Two years later, dancers at the same club raised $20,000 for two local hospitals. Both refused to take the money. It went to five other less-discriminating Windsor organizations instead.
Here in B.C., the interesting thing is that the very same charity that’s refusing the money this time out was being praised a year ago for bucking the trend and accepting money from the same group of dancers.
Up to that point, none of the main cancer organizations wanted to touch a donation from Exotic Dancers for Canada, unless they agreed to remain anonymous. Understandably, the dancers found that just a little demeaning.
The group launched its fundraiser in 2004 as a benefit for a colleague dying of breast cancer.
The following year, after the woman’s death, the fundraiser was staged again to benefit breast-cancer research. But organizer Annie Temple couldn’t find anyone willing to take the donation. As had happened in Windsor back in 1984, the dancers gave the money to an appreciative hospice instead.
The year after, Temple wrote such a compelling letter to the Breast Cancer Society of Canada that they agreed to accept the money from the 2006 event.
“Our bottom line is that any women can get breast cancer. It doesn’t matter what they do, what their profession is,” said cancer society executive director Rany Xanothopoulo a scant year ago.
Since then, however, “certain major donors” have made their displeasure clear. When the exotic dancers called Xanothopoulo this winter about donating the proceeds from their upcoming fundraiser next month, they got the news. Donations from “controversial sources” are no longer being accepted.
In this case, it’s especially outrageous because the dancers are legally employed. They ought to be applauded for their social-mindedness, not spurned for their offers of dirty money. Breast cancer kills more than 5,000 Canadian women a year, so good on them for trying to do their part for that ongoing battle.
The on-line debate around the Breast Cancer Society’s rejection of the donation reveals an overwhelming majority against the decision, although not without a number of people pointing out what a difficult position the society had been put in.
A “major donor” - someone able to provide a great deal of money for the cause, presumably - had made a fuss after the society had taken money from the exotic dancers last year.
The society could either stand on its principle of a year ago and risk losing a lot of money, or reject the donation from the dancers and give up a mere $3,000 or so. The decision makes sense when viewed as a financial dilemma.
I respect the right of the Breast Cancer Society of Canada to do what it has to do. While the Web site of the Sarnia, Ont., non-profit doesn’t breathe a word about the current debate, I have to presume that it did what it thought was necessary in choosing to pass judgment on its donors.
But an organization that does that also has to accept that it’s going to lose a donor like me when it all comes out, because I don’t want to go along with anything like that. If nothing else, this aggravating news of a charity turning away a donation will at least give me an additional thing to ascertain when deciding where to put my own charitable contributions.
Hooray for exotic dancers who care enough to raise money every year for breast cancer. May their money no longer go unwanted.
Feb . 17, 2007
When I first heard about a national breast cancer charity turning down a donation from exotic dancers in Vancouver, I got mad. I fired off a furious e-mail to the Breast Cancer Society of Canada, and suspect a lot of other people did too.
Being an exotic dancer is, after all, a legal profession. Up until 2004, Canada even had a special fast-track immigration category for exotic dancers to ensure the country never ran short of them.
Do we want our charities getting sniffy about taking donations from hard-working, fully legal dancers just because somebody disapproves of how they make a living? That’s what happened in this instance, when the cancer society rejected the proceeds of a fundraiser being put on by Vancouver’s Exotic Dancers For Canada next month.
But while I was poking around on the Web in search of insight into what could have possibly possessed the society to refuse the donation, what became obvious was that the same kind of thing happens all the time. Exotic dancers in particular have had a hard time of it.
The Windsor Star had a story about exotic dancers back in 1984 who tried to donate half of a night’s wages to charity. The local United Way wouldn’t take it, and the dancers finally ended up giving the $3,000 to a Windsor hospice.
Two years later, dancers at the same club raised $20,000 for two local hospitals. Both refused to take the money. It went to five other less-discriminating Windsor organizations instead.
Here in B.C., the interesting thing is that the very same charity that’s refusing the money this time out was being praised a year ago for bucking the trend and accepting money from the same group of dancers.
Up to that point, none of the main cancer organizations wanted to touch a donation from Exotic Dancers for Canada, unless they agreed to remain anonymous. Understandably, the dancers found that just a little demeaning.
The group launched its fundraiser in 2004 as a benefit for a colleague dying of breast cancer.
The following year, after the woman’s death, the fundraiser was staged again to benefit breast-cancer research. But organizer Annie Temple couldn’t find anyone willing to take the donation. As had happened in Windsor back in 1984, the dancers gave the money to an appreciative hospice instead.
The year after, Temple wrote such a compelling letter to the Breast Cancer Society of Canada that they agreed to accept the money from the 2006 event.
“Our bottom line is that any women can get breast cancer. It doesn’t matter what they do, what their profession is,” said cancer society executive director Rany Xanothopoulo a scant year ago.
Since then, however, “certain major donors” have made their displeasure clear. When the exotic dancers called Xanothopoulo this winter about donating the proceeds from their upcoming fundraiser next month, they got the news. Donations from “controversial sources” are no longer being accepted.
In this case, it’s especially outrageous because the dancers are legally employed. They ought to be applauded for their social-mindedness, not spurned for their offers of dirty money. Breast cancer kills more than 5,000 Canadian women a year, so good on them for trying to do their part for that ongoing battle.
The on-line debate around the Breast Cancer Society’s rejection of the donation reveals an overwhelming majority against the decision, although not without a number of people pointing out what a difficult position the society had been put in.
A “major donor” - someone able to provide a great deal of money for the cause, presumably - had made a fuss after the society had taken money from the exotic dancers last year.
The society could either stand on its principle of a year ago and risk losing a lot of money, or reject the donation from the dancers and give up a mere $3,000 or so. The decision makes sense when viewed as a financial dilemma.
I respect the right of the Breast Cancer Society of Canada to do what it has to do. While the Web site of the Sarnia, Ont., non-profit doesn’t breathe a word about the current debate, I have to presume that it did what it thought was necessary in choosing to pass judgment on its donors.
But an organization that does that also has to accept that it’s going to lose a donor like me when it all comes out, because I don’t want to go along with anything like that. If nothing else, this aggravating news of a charity turning away a donation will at least give me an additional thing to ascertain when deciding where to put my own charitable contributions.
Hooray for exotic dancers who care enough to raise money every year for breast cancer. May their money no longer go unwanted.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Nothing appealing about Victoria's Centennial Square
Feb. 9, 2007
What is it about a space that makes you want to stay in it? You and I might have differing theories on that, but I bet we could agree on at least one point: Centennial Square doesn’t have it.
I cut through the square on occasion, and find myself wondering each and every time what it is that makes the place so completely uninviting.
I don’t think I’m alone on this one, either, because the square is disturbingly empty most of the time. People just don’t seem to go there.
No disrespect to the square’s original planner, Rod Clack. I’m sure Centennial Square was a heck of an improvement over what was there 45 years ago when it was built. Victoria’s downtown was still very much in transition from its rough-and-tumble past in those years, and creating public space next to a renovated city hall was a terrific move.
But whatever it was about the square that worked in 1962, it stopped working quite some time ago. To walk through the square on any given day now is to be struck by its unloveliness, and the almost complete absence of people. That’s not what you want from your public spaces.
I’m not suggesting that’s reason enough to jump into a costly reno, or that the time is now just because the B.C. government has up to half a million bucks for communities wanting to build “spirit squares” in the runup to the Olympics. All I’m saying is that as it stands, Centennial Square is all wrong.
A letter in this week’s paper touched on one reason for the problem - the square is in shadow too much of the time. It feels cold. I don’t know if the wind really does blow harder through the square, but that’s my impression every time I pass through.
What’s an even more fundamental problem, however, is that there’s no reason for anyone to use the square. With the exception of a few special events each year, there’s no draw.
No little stores ringing the edges for your shopping pleasure. No food vendors. No guy selling bags of bird seed, or balloons. No artists. No crafts. No comfy gathering places in sunny corners.
In short, the things that make squares work in so many other cities of the world are nowhere to be found in Centennial Square. Other than a mid-block cut-through and a venue for a handful of city-sponsored events, what’s the point of it?
Public spaces can be appealing without commerce, of course. A wander through Beacon Hill Park is a reminder of that, as is a visit to any of our region’s many beautiful public gardens and oceanfront lookouts.
But Centennial Square isn’t anywhere nearly pretty enough at this point to draw people on that level. If that’s what we’re aiming for, we’re well-advised to tear up all the concrete and start from scratch, because there’s nothing about the square in its current state that lures people in just for the sheer pleasure of being there.
If you’re one of the tens of thousands of people who never use Centennial Square, maybe its future seems of little interest to you. But the fate of the square ought to matter to anyone who loves the downtown.
Fix Centennial Square, and you get a lively community space that’s a hub for new retail on the streets around the square. A “jewel” in the heart of Old Towne. Leave it as is, and it’s a concrete no-man’s-land that few shoppers bother to venture past.
Like most things in Victoria, we’ve been talking about doing something about Centennial Square for a very long time. A performing arts centre, a new library, an expanded conference centre - the revamp of Centennial Square is one of the many good ideas regularly floated in Victoria that never quite comes to fruition.
In the case of the square, we’ve been making plans to move the fountain for more than 10 years now. Bob Cross was still the mayor when we last got talking about holding a design contest to improve the square.
Many years on, we’re no farther ahead. Centennial Square continues on as public space that nobody wants to use.
Whatever the future may hold for the square, what it needs most is a reason to be. An unwelcoming and pointless community square is worse than none at all in many ways, as the “dead zones” created by such spaces go against every dictate of good urban planning.
When Centennial Square was first taking shape in the early 1960s, it must have seemed like a wonderful alternative to the ragtag collection of businesses torn down to make way for the square: a couple of brothels, a weary public market, a derelict theatre. It was a good fit for the city at that time.
But like the song says, that was yesterday. And yesterday’s gone.
Feb. 9, 2007
What is it about a space that makes you want to stay in it? You and I might have differing theories on that, but I bet we could agree on at least one point: Centennial Square doesn’t have it.
I cut through the square on occasion, and find myself wondering each and every time what it is that makes the place so completely uninviting.
I don’t think I’m alone on this one, either, because the square is disturbingly empty most of the time. People just don’t seem to go there.
No disrespect to the square’s original planner, Rod Clack. I’m sure Centennial Square was a heck of an improvement over what was there 45 years ago when it was built. Victoria’s downtown was still very much in transition from its rough-and-tumble past in those years, and creating public space next to a renovated city hall was a terrific move.
But whatever it was about the square that worked in 1962, it stopped working quite some time ago. To walk through the square on any given day now is to be struck by its unloveliness, and the almost complete absence of people. That’s not what you want from your public spaces.
I’m not suggesting that’s reason enough to jump into a costly reno, or that the time is now just because the B.C. government has up to half a million bucks for communities wanting to build “spirit squares” in the runup to the Olympics. All I’m saying is that as it stands, Centennial Square is all wrong.
A letter in this week’s paper touched on one reason for the problem - the square is in shadow too much of the time. It feels cold. I don’t know if the wind really does blow harder through the square, but that’s my impression every time I pass through.
What’s an even more fundamental problem, however, is that there’s no reason for anyone to use the square. With the exception of a few special events each year, there’s no draw.
No little stores ringing the edges for your shopping pleasure. No food vendors. No guy selling bags of bird seed, or balloons. No artists. No crafts. No comfy gathering places in sunny corners.
In short, the things that make squares work in so many other cities of the world are nowhere to be found in Centennial Square. Other than a mid-block cut-through and a venue for a handful of city-sponsored events, what’s the point of it?
Public spaces can be appealing without commerce, of course. A wander through Beacon Hill Park is a reminder of that, as is a visit to any of our region’s many beautiful public gardens and oceanfront lookouts.
But Centennial Square isn’t anywhere nearly pretty enough at this point to draw people on that level. If that’s what we’re aiming for, we’re well-advised to tear up all the concrete and start from scratch, because there’s nothing about the square in its current state that lures people in just for the sheer pleasure of being there.
If you’re one of the tens of thousands of people who never use Centennial Square, maybe its future seems of little interest to you. But the fate of the square ought to matter to anyone who loves the downtown.
Fix Centennial Square, and you get a lively community space that’s a hub for new retail on the streets around the square. A “jewel” in the heart of Old Towne. Leave it as is, and it’s a concrete no-man’s-land that few shoppers bother to venture past.
Like most things in Victoria, we’ve been talking about doing something about Centennial Square for a very long time. A performing arts centre, a new library, an expanded conference centre - the revamp of Centennial Square is one of the many good ideas regularly floated in Victoria that never quite comes to fruition.
In the case of the square, we’ve been making plans to move the fountain for more than 10 years now. Bob Cross was still the mayor when we last got talking about holding a design contest to improve the square.
Many years on, we’re no farther ahead. Centennial Square continues on as public space that nobody wants to use.
Whatever the future may hold for the square, what it needs most is a reason to be. An unwelcoming and pointless community square is worse than none at all in many ways, as the “dead zones” created by such spaces go against every dictate of good urban planning.
When Centennial Square was first taking shape in the early 1960s, it must have seemed like a wonderful alternative to the ragtag collection of businesses torn down to make way for the square: a couple of brothels, a weary public market, a derelict theatre. It was a good fit for the city at that time.
But like the song says, that was yesterday. And yesterday’s gone.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Jannit Rabinovitch's death a call to action
Feb. 2, 2007
My friend Jannit Rabinovitch is dead. The loss is huge, and not just to the throng of people who loved her in all her many roles: mother, mentor, lover, friend.
She was that rarest of breeds - someone who set out to change the world and really did. Our communities will feel her loss for decades to come.
The real shame of it is that Jannit had at least 20 more years of community work in her. She was only 57, and showing no signs of growing weary of the fight. Never mind that by that point she’d already built a women’s shelter, launched five grassroots community groups, gotten her PhD and co-parented two fabulous children. Jannit was nowhere near done.
But then the cancer set in last summer. She died last Friday.
She hated the weakness and vulnerability brought on by the disease and its debilitating treatment, and in a way I was glad t hear that she had been set free. But I really don’t know how we’ll create change without her. It scares me to contemplate a world without Jannit.
Not even a month ago, we were talking about me interviewing her to get her extraordinary life down on paper. We never got the chance. She was sick, I was busy, and one day she was gone. Such a lost opportunity.
Her many projects and good works guarantee her legacy. She built Sandy Merriman shelter with a crew of 12 homeless women, and willed into life no less than five organizations built on her unwavering belief that solving our social ills begins with empowering the people caught up in them. We won’t soon forget Jannit.
But will we be able to take up where she left off? If her 30-plus years of hard work is to have meaning, we will have to.
Jannit was 25 when she first stepped into the gap between those who create social services and those who the services are intended for. She was good at it, mostly because she worked hard enough to earn the respect of both the big wheels and the misunderstood people dangling on the edges of our society.
That first project involved youth with disabilities. Jannit had been hired by the B.C. government to manage a student employment program. The incentive for employers was a wage subsidy: 50 per cent for hiring a youth, and 100 per cent for hiring one with a disability.
Despite the offer of free labour, Jannit found that employers just weren’t interested in hiring a kid with a disability. Undeterred, she found a local non-profit interested in the program, and matched it with a school for youth with physical disabilities who were interested in putting out a provincial newsletter for other disabled youths.
Voila. Mission accomplished, in a way that benefited everyone involved.
That was how things went when Jannit was involved. She was a problem-solver, and a strategic thinker. She could figure things out in a way that turned out well for all concerned.
In 1991, while Jannit was working for the City of Victoria’s social planning department, she helped give birth to the Victoria Street Community Association after being tasked with “doing something” about the rising numbers of homeless men. Made up of people who’d personally experienced homelessness, the VSCA went on to develop and run the Medewiwin housing project.
In 1994, Jannit launched a series of conversations with homeless women to figure out their needs. That led to a construction project that saw Sandy Merriman House built by a hired crew of 20 homeless women.
Some of those women were sex workers. They asked Jannit to help them establish their own organization, built on the principle that the people best able to help sex workers are people who’d been there themselves. The Prostitutes Empowerment Education and Resource Society - PEERS - was incorporated as a non-profit the following year. Jannit remained a passionate PEERS board member right up until the cancer overwhelmed her.
In1998, Jannit helped stage a Victoria summit that brought together world policy makers and 55 sexually exploited youth from throughout the Americas. A few years later, she supported her dear friend Cherry Kingsley in the launch of the International Centre to Combat Exploitation of children. More recently, she helped bring to life the National Coalition of Experiential Women, an organization that I hope will one day rock our world around sex-trade issues in Canada.
But all of those achievements are just notes in history if Jannit’s life work ends here. She lived long enough to see the eventual collapse of some of the projects she’d started, and in her last months despaired that her efforts had been for naught.
Hardly. But it takes a lot of effort to give voice to the voiceless. Those who believe in the importance of that will need to pick up where Jannit left off, because there’s tough work ahead.
Jannit made a difference. We will honour her memory by doing the same.
Feb. 2, 2007
My friend Jannit Rabinovitch is dead. The loss is huge, and not just to the throng of people who loved her in all her many roles: mother, mentor, lover, friend.
She was that rarest of breeds - someone who set out to change the world and really did. Our communities will feel her loss for decades to come.
The real shame of it is that Jannit had at least 20 more years of community work in her. She was only 57, and showing no signs of growing weary of the fight. Never mind that by that point she’d already built a women’s shelter, launched five grassroots community groups, gotten her PhD and co-parented two fabulous children. Jannit was nowhere near done.
But then the cancer set in last summer. She died last Friday.
She hated the weakness and vulnerability brought on by the disease and its debilitating treatment, and in a way I was glad t hear that she had been set free. But I really don’t know how we’ll create change without her. It scares me to contemplate a world without Jannit.
Not even a month ago, we were talking about me interviewing her to get her extraordinary life down on paper. We never got the chance. She was sick, I was busy, and one day she was gone. Such a lost opportunity.
Her many projects and good works guarantee her legacy. She built Sandy Merriman shelter with a crew of 12 homeless women, and willed into life no less than five organizations built on her unwavering belief that solving our social ills begins with empowering the people caught up in them. We won’t soon forget Jannit.
But will we be able to take up where she left off? If her 30-plus years of hard work is to have meaning, we will have to.
Jannit was 25 when she first stepped into the gap between those who create social services and those who the services are intended for. She was good at it, mostly because she worked hard enough to earn the respect of both the big wheels and the misunderstood people dangling on the edges of our society.
That first project involved youth with disabilities. Jannit had been hired by the B.C. government to manage a student employment program. The incentive for employers was a wage subsidy: 50 per cent for hiring a youth, and 100 per cent for hiring one with a disability.
Despite the offer of free labour, Jannit found that employers just weren’t interested in hiring a kid with a disability. Undeterred, she found a local non-profit interested in the program, and matched it with a school for youth with physical disabilities who were interested in putting out a provincial newsletter for other disabled youths.
Voila. Mission accomplished, in a way that benefited everyone involved.
That was how things went when Jannit was involved. She was a problem-solver, and a strategic thinker. She could figure things out in a way that turned out well for all concerned.
In 1991, while Jannit was working for the City of Victoria’s social planning department, she helped give birth to the Victoria Street Community Association after being tasked with “doing something” about the rising numbers of homeless men. Made up of people who’d personally experienced homelessness, the VSCA went on to develop and run the Medewiwin housing project.
In 1994, Jannit launched a series of conversations with homeless women to figure out their needs. That led to a construction project that saw Sandy Merriman House built by a hired crew of 20 homeless women.
Some of those women were sex workers. They asked Jannit to help them establish their own organization, built on the principle that the people best able to help sex workers are people who’d been there themselves. The Prostitutes Empowerment Education and Resource Society - PEERS - was incorporated as a non-profit the following year. Jannit remained a passionate PEERS board member right up until the cancer overwhelmed her.
In1998, Jannit helped stage a Victoria summit that brought together world policy makers and 55 sexually exploited youth from throughout the Americas. A few years later, she supported her dear friend Cherry Kingsley in the launch of the International Centre to Combat Exploitation of children. More recently, she helped bring to life the National Coalition of Experiential Women, an organization that I hope will one day rock our world around sex-trade issues in Canada.
But all of those achievements are just notes in history if Jannit’s life work ends here. She lived long enough to see the eventual collapse of some of the projects she’d started, and in her last months despaired that her efforts had been for naught.
Hardly. But it takes a lot of effort to give voice to the voiceless. Those who believe in the importance of that will need to pick up where Jannit left off, because there’s tough work ahead.
Jannit made a difference. We will honour her memory by doing the same.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Pickton trial no relief for outdoor sex workers
Jan. 26, 2007
Today was going to be the day I didn’t write about social issues. Too much thinking about the frightening mistakes being made these days can really bum me out.
But then Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan came out with his happily-ever-after take this week on how the trial of Robert Pickton will be the thing that changes everything for the troubled women the pig farmer allegedly preyed on.
“There's no doubt that a very big, negative impression is going to be created by this," said Sullivan when asked about the impact of Pickton’s trial on Vancouver’s reputation.
"But hopefully, out of this, we can turn it into a good-news story and find a way to ensure that no women will ever have to put themselves at risk again in this way."
I just couldn’t let that go.
If we actually planned on making a difference in the lives of the women who go missing on our streets, there’d have been some sign of it by now. We’ve known for many years that women are dying out there. It’s not like we can claim surprise.
They’ve been going missing in significant numbers since the 1980s. They’ve gone missing in Vancouver, in Prince George, in Edmonton and Victoria - in every city in Canada, no doubt.
Sure, we’ve wrung our hands about the situation. Our newspaper archives are laden with our outbursts of dismay and horror.
But we haven’t actually done anything. An extremely disadvantaged group of women and youth are still having to work the dark streets on the edges of our towns.
Violence is routine, whether robbery; rape or assault. Addiction is common. So are the many illnesses that result from combining heavy drug use, poor nutrition, and a hard, hard life.
The men who shop for sex among such disadvantaged people run the gamut. Many of them aren’t out to hurt anyone. But given the state of the modern-day Canadian outdoor prostitution stroll, a few killers are bound to find their way there.
The conditions on the stroll are such that murderous types are provided with anonymous access to a population that’s widely shunned by the mainstream.
That population works in the dark, and largely out of sight. The drugs are everywhere, so nobody’s eager to call in the police. The workers are often sick, desperate and out of options, making them easy pickings.
If you were looking for a woman or a kid who nobody was going to make too big a deal about if they went missing, where would you look?
So Sullivan’s bright-new-day comments are just a bit much, given our fairly horrifying lack of action to date.
We can’t just hope to “find a way.” We have to actively seek one out. If we don’t want a subclass of workers vanishing on the edges of our cities, what are we prepared to do about it?
Would we consider trying to house them, for instance? Would we actively help them find another way to make a living? Would we find a safer place for the ones who continue to work, and get them the health care they need to get a handle on their addictions?
I talked to the Canadian Labour Congress the other day about whether the organization would ever consider coming out in defence of a safer sex trade. The members are divided, I was told. No position has been taken.
With all due respect to the members - and to anyone who still thinks we will eliminate prostitution - people are dying out there. They were dying before the Pickton case ever made headlines and they’ll be dying long after if all we’re going to do is more dithering about whether we feel ready to deal with the bigger issues of prostitution.
The first thing to do is strengthen social services, because many of the thousands of women working on B.C.’s outdoor strolls would gladly be doing something else for a living if it was an option. They need a place to clean up and housing they can afford, and maybe three or four years of solid support to get their lives straightened out.
Next comes the workplace.
We wouldn’t tolerate the ridiculous conditions of work that sex workers endure for any other profession. We shouldn’t be tolerating them for the workers of the sex industry either. Whatever our feelings on prostitution, surely we can all agree that adults working in it deserve a safe, healthy and fair workplace.
Improving the situation for women on the outdoor stroll also requires a commitment to cracking down hard on the men who go there to hurt somebody. Nothing about the sale of sex has to involve violence. The killing of a sex worker is not about a “high risk lifestyle,” but about our willingness to apply that term as an excuse for doing nothing.
It doesn’t have to be that way. But if we can’t get beyond the talk, the Pickton trial is nothing more than a pause in the proceedings for B.C.’s most vulnerable workers.
Jan. 26, 2007
Today was going to be the day I didn’t write about social issues. Too much thinking about the frightening mistakes being made these days can really bum me out.
But then Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan came out with his happily-ever-after take this week on how the trial of Robert Pickton will be the thing that changes everything for the troubled women the pig farmer allegedly preyed on.
“There's no doubt that a very big, negative impression is going to be created by this," said Sullivan when asked about the impact of Pickton’s trial on Vancouver’s reputation.
"But hopefully, out of this, we can turn it into a good-news story and find a way to ensure that no women will ever have to put themselves at risk again in this way."
I just couldn’t let that go.
If we actually planned on making a difference in the lives of the women who go missing on our streets, there’d have been some sign of it by now. We’ve known for many years that women are dying out there. It’s not like we can claim surprise.
They’ve been going missing in significant numbers since the 1980s. They’ve gone missing in Vancouver, in Prince George, in Edmonton and Victoria - in every city in Canada, no doubt.
Sure, we’ve wrung our hands about the situation. Our newspaper archives are laden with our outbursts of dismay and horror.
But we haven’t actually done anything. An extremely disadvantaged group of women and youth are still having to work the dark streets on the edges of our towns.
Violence is routine, whether robbery; rape or assault. Addiction is common. So are the many illnesses that result from combining heavy drug use, poor nutrition, and a hard, hard life.
The men who shop for sex among such disadvantaged people run the gamut. Many of them aren’t out to hurt anyone. But given the state of the modern-day Canadian outdoor prostitution stroll, a few killers are bound to find their way there.
The conditions on the stroll are such that murderous types are provided with anonymous access to a population that’s widely shunned by the mainstream.
That population works in the dark, and largely out of sight. The drugs are everywhere, so nobody’s eager to call in the police. The workers are often sick, desperate and out of options, making them easy pickings.
If you were looking for a woman or a kid who nobody was going to make too big a deal about if they went missing, where would you look?
So Sullivan’s bright-new-day comments are just a bit much, given our fairly horrifying lack of action to date.
We can’t just hope to “find a way.” We have to actively seek one out. If we don’t want a subclass of workers vanishing on the edges of our cities, what are we prepared to do about it?
Would we consider trying to house them, for instance? Would we actively help them find another way to make a living? Would we find a safer place for the ones who continue to work, and get them the health care they need to get a handle on their addictions?
I talked to the Canadian Labour Congress the other day about whether the organization would ever consider coming out in defence of a safer sex trade. The members are divided, I was told. No position has been taken.
With all due respect to the members - and to anyone who still thinks we will eliminate prostitution - people are dying out there. They were dying before the Pickton case ever made headlines and they’ll be dying long after if all we’re going to do is more dithering about whether we feel ready to deal with the bigger issues of prostitution.
The first thing to do is strengthen social services, because many of the thousands of women working on B.C.’s outdoor strolls would gladly be doing something else for a living if it was an option. They need a place to clean up and housing they can afford, and maybe three or four years of solid support to get their lives straightened out.
Next comes the workplace.
We wouldn’t tolerate the ridiculous conditions of work that sex workers endure for any other profession. We shouldn’t be tolerating them for the workers of the sex industry either. Whatever our feelings on prostitution, surely we can all agree that adults working in it deserve a safe, healthy and fair workplace.
Improving the situation for women on the outdoor stroll also requires a commitment to cracking down hard on the men who go there to hurt somebody. Nothing about the sale of sex has to involve violence. The killing of a sex worker is not about a “high risk lifestyle,” but about our willingness to apply that term as an excuse for doing nothing.
It doesn’t have to be that way. But if we can’t get beyond the talk, the Pickton trial is nothing more than a pause in the proceedings for B.C.’s most vulnerable workers.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Going nowhere fast, and spending a fortune to do it
Jan. 19, 2007
If you’re the type to worry about where we’re headed in this world, these are bleak times.
We’re at one of those points in history where things on any number of fronts are either going to get much better or a whole lot worse based on whatever we do next. Unfortunately, we’re showing few signs of being up for the challenge.
I’ve often wondered at what point a community ignites. How did the small, brave acts of people in the U.S. finally explode into the civil rights movement? What finally elevated gay rights to being a legitimate issue that mattered?
To know that would perhaps be the secret to unlocking this national stupor of ours, one that seems to render us incapable of addressing an array of really serious problems unfolding around us.
We would not for a moment be so cavalier in our personal lives. We wouldn’t continue to do things that clearly weren’t working, or spend vast sums of money without ever questioning the benefit.
Yet we tolerate it for our country. We see the error of our ways, yet continue down the same path anyway. It turns out the road to hell really is paved with good intentions.
I can only hope for revolution.
No violence, of course - nothing truly good ever comes from that. But we’re way overdue for a peaceful uprising, something much bigger than just another election. Either that or go mad from all the senseless, short-sighted decision making that has accumulated to a point of crisis.
The issue of the moment is our national drug “strategy,” which has once more been revealed as being both tremendously expensive and completely ineffective at the same time.
This time it’s B.C.’s Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS pointing the finger, noting that the federal government’s promises three years ago to do better have yet to materialize. Meanwhile, the country’s drug problems set us back $2.5 billion and we didn’t even make a dent in them.
I suppose it comes down to a battle between those who believe we just need to crack down a little harder on drugs, and those who think that living through several miserable decades of that tired old strategy ought to be proof enough that it doesn’t work.
The most damning evidence that it doesn’t is the relentless climb in drug use. Ten years ago, 28.5 per cent of Canadians had consumed illicit drugs in their lifetime. Now, 45 per cent have. A survey two years ago found that almost 270,000 Canadians were currently injecting drugs.
The worst of the impact can be seen in the heart of our communities, where the homeless and the addicted pile up in disturbingly larger numbers. But the true toll of our adherence to flawed drug policy is much greater than that.
It encompasses lost income and family disaster. Rising infection rates. A growing health burden. A truly staggering annual bill for policing: $1.4 billion.
All that money spent, and not a damn thing accomplished.
How can that not be the stuff of revolution? Instead, we tolerate more of the same. We curse the waste, but do nothing more than to mark an “X” every four or five years beside the name of whatever local candidate tickled our fancy in the runup to the election.
Like so many issues that paralyze our nation, the drug debate comes down to strong differences in opinion among us. Nothing wrong with a difference in opinion. But when you’ve tried it one way and have all the stats to prove that it didn’t work, it’s time to put opinion in its place and get down to the business of fixing things.
In terms of drug policy, we are torn between those who still think we can “stamp out” drug use, and those who know we can’t. Once upon a time, we probably didn’t know which was the right course to take.
But decades on, we can’t say that anymore. We’ve given far more years and money than we should have to flawed strategies based on the criminalization of drug use.
I don’t have an Ipsos-Reid survey in my pocket to back me up, but I suspect a majority of Canadians would agree with that. I think they’re tired of everything to do with our failed drug strategies - from having their cars broken into, to seeing their income taxes frittered away on ineffective programs even while people howl for more services.
But will we revolt? That doesn’t seem to be the Canadian way.
Tremendous changes are occurring around us, from urban decay to climate change, from a rise in drug use to a drop in health and fitness. Still, our concern and indignation rarely develop past the level of mildly testy water-cooler conversation.
Surely the moment has to come soon - the one that finally sets a fire under us. Here’s hoping for an inferno.
Jan. 19, 2007
If you’re the type to worry about where we’re headed in this world, these are bleak times.
We’re at one of those points in history where things on any number of fronts are either going to get much better or a whole lot worse based on whatever we do next. Unfortunately, we’re showing few signs of being up for the challenge.
I’ve often wondered at what point a community ignites. How did the small, brave acts of people in the U.S. finally explode into the civil rights movement? What finally elevated gay rights to being a legitimate issue that mattered?
To know that would perhaps be the secret to unlocking this national stupor of ours, one that seems to render us incapable of addressing an array of really serious problems unfolding around us.
We would not for a moment be so cavalier in our personal lives. We wouldn’t continue to do things that clearly weren’t working, or spend vast sums of money without ever questioning the benefit.
Yet we tolerate it for our country. We see the error of our ways, yet continue down the same path anyway. It turns out the road to hell really is paved with good intentions.
I can only hope for revolution.
No violence, of course - nothing truly good ever comes from that. But we’re way overdue for a peaceful uprising, something much bigger than just another election. Either that or go mad from all the senseless, short-sighted decision making that has accumulated to a point of crisis.
The issue of the moment is our national drug “strategy,” which has once more been revealed as being both tremendously expensive and completely ineffective at the same time.
This time it’s B.C.’s Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS pointing the finger, noting that the federal government’s promises three years ago to do better have yet to materialize. Meanwhile, the country’s drug problems set us back $2.5 billion and we didn’t even make a dent in them.
I suppose it comes down to a battle between those who believe we just need to crack down a little harder on drugs, and those who think that living through several miserable decades of that tired old strategy ought to be proof enough that it doesn’t work.
The most damning evidence that it doesn’t is the relentless climb in drug use. Ten years ago, 28.5 per cent of Canadians had consumed illicit drugs in their lifetime. Now, 45 per cent have. A survey two years ago found that almost 270,000 Canadians were currently injecting drugs.
The worst of the impact can be seen in the heart of our communities, where the homeless and the addicted pile up in disturbingly larger numbers. But the true toll of our adherence to flawed drug policy is much greater than that.
It encompasses lost income and family disaster. Rising infection rates. A growing health burden. A truly staggering annual bill for policing: $1.4 billion.
All that money spent, and not a damn thing accomplished.
How can that not be the stuff of revolution? Instead, we tolerate more of the same. We curse the waste, but do nothing more than to mark an “X” every four or five years beside the name of whatever local candidate tickled our fancy in the runup to the election.
Like so many issues that paralyze our nation, the drug debate comes down to strong differences in opinion among us. Nothing wrong with a difference in opinion. But when you’ve tried it one way and have all the stats to prove that it didn’t work, it’s time to put opinion in its place and get down to the business of fixing things.
In terms of drug policy, we are torn between those who still think we can “stamp out” drug use, and those who know we can’t. Once upon a time, we probably didn’t know which was the right course to take.
But decades on, we can’t say that anymore. We’ve given far more years and money than we should have to flawed strategies based on the criminalization of drug use.
I don’t have an Ipsos-Reid survey in my pocket to back me up, but I suspect a majority of Canadians would agree with that. I think they’re tired of everything to do with our failed drug strategies - from having their cars broken into, to seeing their income taxes frittered away on ineffective programs even while people howl for more services.
But will we revolt? That doesn’t seem to be the Canadian way.
Tremendous changes are occurring around us, from urban decay to climate change, from a rise in drug use to a drop in health and fitness. Still, our concern and indignation rarely develop past the level of mildly testy water-cooler conversation.
Surely the moment has to come soon - the one that finally sets a fire under us. Here’s hoping for an inferno.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Derik Lord's long wait
The tale of two foolish teenage boys hired to carry out a murder that was supposed to make them rich is a veritable Aesop’s fable in terms of the obvious moral of the story.
One of the boys admitted his guilt from the outset, and did what the system required of him during 10 years in prison. In return for his good behaviour, David Muir was granted parole five years ago for the two murders he helped carry out in 1990.
The other has steadfastly denied his guilt. He has refused to take required prison programs, and his father has developed into a notorious agitator who infuriates prison officials. So Derik Lord remains in jail, denied parole for a fourth time last month.
The moral: Things go better for people who accept responsibility. Unfortunately for Lord, the opportunity to act accordingly just may have passed.
Lord, Muir and pal Darren Huenemann were teen friends in Saanich when they were convicted in 1992 of carrying out the murders of Darren’s mother and grandmother at the older woman’s Tsawwassen home.
Nobody who knew them could believe it at first. But prosecutors headed into trial with some significant evidence. Included were tapes of a flurry of phone calls between the boys after police told Muir they had a witness who could place the boy - then just 15 - in Tsawwassen at the time of the murders.
Prosecutors also had Huenemann’s young girlfriend, who had a damning story of picking the boys up at the Swartz Bay ferry terminal and hearing of the events of that night.
And then there was the story told by Muir. He told police that he and Lord had been hired by Huenemann to kill the teenager’s mother and grandmother. Huenemann stood to inherit $4 million from their deaths, and had promised to share his newfound fortune with his friends.
In Lord’s version, all three boys were at the Lord family home at 8:30 p.m. on the night of the murders, which meant they couldn’t have been in Tsawwassen. It’s an all-or-nothing story. To believe Lord, you have to believe that none of the boys were guilty - even though Muir confessed to everything.
Derik’s mother Elouise backs up her son. She says she was at home that night and saw all three boys in the basement. Derik’s father David, while not there that night, ferociously adheres to the same story, sometimes to the point of getting himself thrown in jail for protesting some aspect of his son’s incarceration.
Law-abiding before Derik’s conviction, David has turned into something of a chronic troublemaker in the intervening years. When I visited the family six years ago, David joked that his tombstone would read “Well-known to police.”
I had gone to Chilliwack to interview the family , where they’d moved from Saanich years earlier to be closer to Derik at Matsqui penitentiary. The parents were resolutely convinced of Derik’s innocence, and still are.
The irony is that their need to believe that Derik doesn’t deserve to be in prison ensures that he’ll never get out.
It also guarantees the worst kind of prison time. Any time somebody in charge grows weary of Derik’s ongoing refusal to admit his guilt, he’s dispatched to a tougher prison as punishment. The 33-year-old had worked his way into a healing-style aboriginal prison by the time of his last bid for parole. Now, he’s back behind bars in Matsqui.
How will it end for Lord? Possibly with a genuine lifetime in jail if he continues to deny the murders. The system may have grown more sensitive to allegations of wrongful conviction, but not in a case where only one of the three men convicted is continuing to deny the trio’s crime.
I got an anonymous e-mail the last time I wrote about Lord in 2001, declaring that Lord was very much guilty as charged no matter what he said.
I think he likely is. But it would be a tremendously hard confession for him to make now, given that his parents have spent the last 10 years and every nickel of their savings on asserting his innocence.
They believe in his innocence, and I sometimes think he has ended up convincing himself of that as well. But if you can’t admit guilt, you stay in jail. And so it goes for Derik Lord.
No one is well-served by keeping Lord in prison. Jails are expensive, and not known for their positive impacts. If Lord was a violent young man, he hasn’t stayed that way, and seems like the kind of guy who’d lead a quiet life far from the public eye if ever released.
But the stories a family tells itself sometimes take on lives of their own, and pretty soon there’s no turning back. The burden of the lie just may be Lord’s to bear for a lifetime.
One of the boys admitted his guilt from the outset, and did what the system required of him during 10 years in prison. In return for his good behaviour, David Muir was granted parole five years ago for the two murders he helped carry out in 1990.
The other has steadfastly denied his guilt. He has refused to take required prison programs, and his father has developed into a notorious agitator who infuriates prison officials. So Derik Lord remains in jail, denied parole for a fourth time last month.
The moral: Things go better for people who accept responsibility. Unfortunately for Lord, the opportunity to act accordingly just may have passed.
Lord, Muir and pal Darren Huenemann were teen friends in Saanich when they were convicted in 1992 of carrying out the murders of Darren’s mother and grandmother at the older woman’s Tsawwassen home.
Nobody who knew them could believe it at first. But prosecutors headed into trial with some significant evidence. Included were tapes of a flurry of phone calls between the boys after police told Muir they had a witness who could place the boy - then just 15 - in Tsawwassen at the time of the murders.
Prosecutors also had Huenemann’s young girlfriend, who had a damning story of picking the boys up at the Swartz Bay ferry terminal and hearing of the events of that night.
And then there was the story told by Muir. He told police that he and Lord had been hired by Huenemann to kill the teenager’s mother and grandmother. Huenemann stood to inherit $4 million from their deaths, and had promised to share his newfound fortune with his friends.
In Lord’s version, all three boys were at the Lord family home at 8:30 p.m. on the night of the murders, which meant they couldn’t have been in Tsawwassen. It’s an all-or-nothing story. To believe Lord, you have to believe that none of the boys were guilty - even though Muir confessed to everything.
Derik’s mother Elouise backs up her son. She says she was at home that night and saw all three boys in the basement. Derik’s father David, while not there that night, ferociously adheres to the same story, sometimes to the point of getting himself thrown in jail for protesting some aspect of his son’s incarceration.
Law-abiding before Derik’s conviction, David has turned into something of a chronic troublemaker in the intervening years. When I visited the family six years ago, David joked that his tombstone would read “Well-known to police.”
I had gone to Chilliwack to interview the family , where they’d moved from Saanich years earlier to be closer to Derik at Matsqui penitentiary. The parents were resolutely convinced of Derik’s innocence, and still are.
The irony is that their need to believe that Derik doesn’t deserve to be in prison ensures that he’ll never get out.
It also guarantees the worst kind of prison time. Any time somebody in charge grows weary of Derik’s ongoing refusal to admit his guilt, he’s dispatched to a tougher prison as punishment. The 33-year-old had worked his way into a healing-style aboriginal prison by the time of his last bid for parole. Now, he’s back behind bars in Matsqui.
How will it end for Lord? Possibly with a genuine lifetime in jail if he continues to deny the murders. The system may have grown more sensitive to allegations of wrongful conviction, but not in a case where only one of the three men convicted is continuing to deny the trio’s crime.
I got an anonymous e-mail the last time I wrote about Lord in 2001, declaring that Lord was very much guilty as charged no matter what he said.
I think he likely is. But it would be a tremendously hard confession for him to make now, given that his parents have spent the last 10 years and every nickel of their savings on asserting his innocence.
They believe in his innocence, and I sometimes think he has ended up convincing himself of that as well. But if you can’t admit guilt, you stay in jail. And so it goes for Derik Lord.
No one is well-served by keeping Lord in prison. Jails are expensive, and not known for their positive impacts. If Lord was a violent young man, he hasn’t stayed that way, and seems like the kind of guy who’d lead a quiet life far from the public eye if ever released.
But the stories a family tells itself sometimes take on lives of their own, and pretty soon there’s no turning back. The burden of the lie just may be Lord’s to bear for a lifetime.
Sunday, January 07, 2007
The entrenchment of MRSA
Jan. 5, 2007
More than 1,000 people in our region will catch a terrible infection this year that no antibiotic will easily defeat. The worst cases will be fatal, but even the ones that aren’t will still be dangerous, unpleasant and extremely difficult to clear up.
Once upon a time, an infection like the one taking root right now was a problem only for very specific populations. A few isolated tribes of Australian aborigines. People living on the streets. Athletes playing contact sports. Military recruits.
Not anymore. The staph infections showing up in our community lately are occurring in people with no known risk factors. “We are the epicentre of the country,” local infection specialist Dr. Pamela Kibsey said this week.
Human beings have been grappling with staphylococcus infections for millennia, of course. No small wonder penicillin was given a hero’s welcome upon its invention in the 1940s, considering how many people had been killed by infection up to that point.
Alas, you can’t keep a bad bug down. From the emergence of penicillin-resistant staph barely a decade after penicillin’s discovery, to the multi-resistant “superbugs” of today, we have yet to vanquish a very old foe.
Bacteria are clever beasts, and likely would have given us a run for our money no matter what strategy we took for surviving their onslaughts. Staph bacteria have reached the point of being able to mutate almost as fast as the latest wonder drug is being rushed to market.
But we’ve also aided the bugs’ cause immensely by doing just about everything wrong in terms of infection control. It starts with years of gulping antibiotics like candy and continues through a long series of health-care and social policy changes made for reasons of economy rather than disease management.
And now we’ve all got a problem.
The latest version of staph has a big name: Community-acquired Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus. The experts call it CA-MRSA.
In this region, we’ve been living with HA-MRSA - the kind you get in hospital - for almost a decade. What’s going on now is basically the result of the same bug, except you don’t have to go to the hospital anymore to end up infected.
My dad had the dubious honour in the late 1990s of being one of the first hospital patients in the region to acquire MRSA. The bacteria got into a surgical wound. The ensuing infection almost killed him, and the heavy-duty antibiotics he had to be on took almost as serious a toll.
More pertinently to those beyond his immediate family, he cost the system a fortune. He was in isolation in hospital for five months, on an antibiotic drip that cost more than $150 a day.
The intensity of his illness definitely would have pushed up his nursing costs. And every day he was in hospital meant another day of risk for everyone else who was in there, because staphylococcus aureas spreads like crazy among the sick and weak.
Add eight years of inflation and the spiralling costs of pharmaceuticals, and you can figure out how much this same scenario would cost today. If my dad had been in his working years and not yet retired, the financial hit he’d have taken from being laid up for five months would have been disastrous on a whole other level for my family.
Not all of the 1,000 cases of MRSA in the coming year will be as dramatic, of course. Staph presents differently in everybody, from relatively minor boils to ravaged lungs. A few of us live with MRSA in our bodies all the time, and never get sick.
Still, the entrenchment of MRSA over time is the alarming part. I used to think the trick was to stay away from antibiotics and hospitals, but now it seems that even those ramparts have been breached. The world is growing ill enough that individual efforts to stay healthy are no longer a guarantee.
Why the rise in infection? Pick your theory. We now have ghettos of street people being left to sicken in our downtowns. We’ve seen huge changes in health care. Our food supply is downright alarming, saturated in antibiotics.
Start with an increasingly privatized and mobile health-care force that travels from site to site, inadvertently spreading infection. Mix in ever-shorter hospital stays, heightening the risk that someone is released into the community before their brewing infection is even noticed. Then there’s the overcrowded emergency rooms, stacked with those sickly victims of the street and everybody jammed together for hours.
We eat meat and eggs from antibiotic-laden animals, the poor sods would not survive the miserable conditions of factory farming without the drugs. We overuse antibiotics ourselves, continuing to take them for the wrong things, at the wrong time, in the wrong way.
It doesn’t have to be this way. But for as long as it is, brace yourself for the consequences.
Jan. 5, 2007
More than 1,000 people in our region will catch a terrible infection this year that no antibiotic will easily defeat. The worst cases will be fatal, but even the ones that aren’t will still be dangerous, unpleasant and extremely difficult to clear up.
Once upon a time, an infection like the one taking root right now was a problem only for very specific populations. A few isolated tribes of Australian aborigines. People living on the streets. Athletes playing contact sports. Military recruits.
Not anymore. The staph infections showing up in our community lately are occurring in people with no known risk factors. “We are the epicentre of the country,” local infection specialist Dr. Pamela Kibsey said this week.
Human beings have been grappling with staphylococcus infections for millennia, of course. No small wonder penicillin was given a hero’s welcome upon its invention in the 1940s, considering how many people had been killed by infection up to that point.
Alas, you can’t keep a bad bug down. From the emergence of penicillin-resistant staph barely a decade after penicillin’s discovery, to the multi-resistant “superbugs” of today, we have yet to vanquish a very old foe.
Bacteria are clever beasts, and likely would have given us a run for our money no matter what strategy we took for surviving their onslaughts. Staph bacteria have reached the point of being able to mutate almost as fast as the latest wonder drug is being rushed to market.
But we’ve also aided the bugs’ cause immensely by doing just about everything wrong in terms of infection control. It starts with years of gulping antibiotics like candy and continues through a long series of health-care and social policy changes made for reasons of economy rather than disease management.
And now we’ve all got a problem.
The latest version of staph has a big name: Community-acquired Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus. The experts call it CA-MRSA.
In this region, we’ve been living with HA-MRSA - the kind you get in hospital - for almost a decade. What’s going on now is basically the result of the same bug, except you don’t have to go to the hospital anymore to end up infected.
My dad had the dubious honour in the late 1990s of being one of the first hospital patients in the region to acquire MRSA. The bacteria got into a surgical wound. The ensuing infection almost killed him, and the heavy-duty antibiotics he had to be on took almost as serious a toll.
More pertinently to those beyond his immediate family, he cost the system a fortune. He was in isolation in hospital for five months, on an antibiotic drip that cost more than $150 a day.
The intensity of his illness definitely would have pushed up his nursing costs. And every day he was in hospital meant another day of risk for everyone else who was in there, because staphylococcus aureas spreads like crazy among the sick and weak.
Add eight years of inflation and the spiralling costs of pharmaceuticals, and you can figure out how much this same scenario would cost today. If my dad had been in his working years and not yet retired, the financial hit he’d have taken from being laid up for five months would have been disastrous on a whole other level for my family.
Not all of the 1,000 cases of MRSA in the coming year will be as dramatic, of course. Staph presents differently in everybody, from relatively minor boils to ravaged lungs. A few of us live with MRSA in our bodies all the time, and never get sick.
Still, the entrenchment of MRSA over time is the alarming part. I used to think the trick was to stay away from antibiotics and hospitals, but now it seems that even those ramparts have been breached. The world is growing ill enough that individual efforts to stay healthy are no longer a guarantee.
Why the rise in infection? Pick your theory. We now have ghettos of street people being left to sicken in our downtowns. We’ve seen huge changes in health care. Our food supply is downright alarming, saturated in antibiotics.
Start with an increasingly privatized and mobile health-care force that travels from site to site, inadvertently spreading infection. Mix in ever-shorter hospital stays, heightening the risk that someone is released into the community before their brewing infection is even noticed. Then there’s the overcrowded emergency rooms, stacked with those sickly victims of the street and everybody jammed together for hours.
We eat meat and eggs from antibiotic-laden animals, the poor sods would not survive the miserable conditions of factory farming without the drugs. We overuse antibiotics ourselves, continuing to take them for the wrong things, at the wrong time, in the wrong way.
It doesn’t have to be this way. But for as long as it is, brace yourself for the consequences.
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