Inaction
Jan. 28, 2006
It would take much more than a mere 800 words to muse on what causes a person to look at the world a certain way, while another looks at it completely differently. Wars are fought over just such a thing, and human history is littered with the debris of the various solitudes bashing into one another.
But it’s certainly the great tragedy of the human condition. Our differences are always getting in the way. Whatever size the stage - a neighbourhood zoning dispute, a global crisis - each of us sees the world so differently as to find it inexplicable that others might see it otherwise.
Even when we agree long enough to actually solve problems, we seek reasons to disagree over the answers. Case in point: the news this week that British Columbians’ measurable health is the best in Canada, even while many of us believe that our health system is serving us poorly. Is the problem a disconnect between those who set health-care policy and their subjects? Or is it merely just more evidence of the contrarianism that defines our species?
The trouble is, the indecision is making a real hash of things. Not surprisingly, a fractious bunch of people with disparate views and short attention spans don’t do so well at the hard and painstaking work of building nations. So world events unfold as if fated, when in fact they’re merely the result of sloppy planning and a lack of consensus.
It’s the reason we’re still talking about whether people should be given the right to manage their own deaths - 20 years after Sue Rodriguez gave the last years of her life to an ultimately fruitless attempt to move the cause forward. And it’s why women in our own communities still have to work outside in the dark, where they can continue to be killed and beaten at breathtaking pace.
It’s why people are piling up on our streets despite more than two decades of talking about the need to act, and why most of the health reforms of the late 1980s targeting the region’s seniors fell apart a few years later. In a system where governments move in and out on waves of political favour and entrenched world views, no effort on any front can be sustained long enough for genuine systemic change.
As we learned during the federal election, even vital rights reforms like gay marriage can be shelved at any time in a country like ours. We congratulate ourselves for one step forward, but the possibility of two steps back is always close at hand.
Standing on such shifting sands makes me fear the futility of trying to make the world a better place, because there’s nothing saying that any of it will survive past a few years of earnest but unsustainable effort. On the other hand, to stop believing that dramatic reform is forever is too unsettling to contemplate.
I continue to wait for the revolution, and am discouraged that it seems to be nowhere in sight. I used to think women were going to be the ones to lead the charge, but the wind went out of that sail pretty fast, for reasons probably having to do with a generation of good feminists growing older, getting happy, and just not having the mojo anymore for a fight that the larger women’s community never showed much interest in.
Disparate views divide women as well, of course. We’re no better than men at reaching long-term consensus. We take up positions as rigidly as any man, and fight just as bitterly to stop those who don’t share our views. Even if we’d figured out by now how to rule the world, I suspect we’d still be hampered in our efforts by the collision of a number of strongly held female viewpoints out there as to how things ought to be done.
What’s a country to do? To begin with, acknowledge it. People think differently, even in a country as relatively cohesive as Canada. The reason the guy down the street drives you crazy is exactly the same reason why you drive him crazy: You disagree. He sees black and you see white, and each of you are baffled by the other.
We lose too much time to that bafflement. That and futile attempts to convince others to share our beliefs eat up years that would be much better spent in solving whatever problem has us worried.
We can wring our hands about Iran’s nuclear capability, or we can find our way to a new global agreement that recognizes how much every one of us has at stake on this issue. We can entrench ourselves a little deeper over the roots of homelessness, or we can get over it and start working on thoughtful, long-term policies that might actually address the problem.
Maybe we’ll never agree. But for the sake of the world, we do have to act.
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
FASD
Jan. 28, 2006
A young woman who I’m very fond of was sentenced to four months in jail this week, and I cheered at the news. I high-fived my co-workers, who’d been hoping for jail time as well. It could have been a jubilant moment if it all wasn’t so damn sad.
The young woman is 23 going on six in some of the ways she relates to the world, and jail isn’t the right place for her. What she really needs is to be taken in by a warm, motherly woman who’d keep her fed, loved and busy for as long as it takes for her to get a grip on her life, even if she never does.
But there’s nothing like that in this world of ours for people like my young friend. She doesn’t quite fit in anybody’s box. And so it’s off to jail on a trafficking charge and the inevitable breaches, and me happy about it just for the chance to see her get a couple enforced months of nourishment and shelter - and hopefully, a break from cocaine.
If you knew her story, you would not be surprised at how it’s come to this, as her wounded life begins with a mother who drank while pregnant and carries on through poverty, family tragedy, her own early pregnancies and addiction. She has been homeless for the better part of two years now despite all the best efforts of local service agencies that support her, because the services that might help her in a more meaningful way simply don’t exist.
Life tends to teach most of us through trial and error. We do something that turns out badly and as a result, resolve not to do it again. But for people whose mothers drank while pregnant, that’s often not true. The part of the brain that governs judgment and impulse control is permanently damaged, as are other essential body systems. The children of drinking mothers are forever different, and in ways that don’t fit well in an uninformed and impatient society.
In an ideal world, it wouldn’t matter much. A problem would be looked at as a problem regardless of its root, and solved accordingly. The ongoing dilemma of my young friend’s life need not be her inescapable fate - all she needs is suitable services flexible enough to accommodate the person that she is.
Were her IQ below 70, there might be more help for her. Or if she was under 19 and could still be considered a child. The damage done to her brain by her mother’s drinking may one day be her ticket to services when the province launches its anticipated strategy for Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, but right now there’s barely a thing going on in terms of direct help.
And so there’s nothing for this young woman beyond the Band-Aid care of street-level social agencies, which can do little except to pick her up after every fall and pray that she survives the next one. If it weren’t for her street community and a network of pals at the agencies she visits, there would be no one in her life.
How can it be that I’m rooting for jail for her - me, the bleeding-heart liberal who can barely stand the way we use our jails at the best of times?
But that’s what it comes down to after you see someone you’re very fond of risking death every night on the streets, via any number of means. When the option is having somebody steal your cold, damp blanket right off your back while you’re shivering outside with the fever of staph infections ravaging your body, jail doesn’t look so bad.
Years ago, I talked to a woman with a brain-injured son who was trying to explain her immense frustration with a system that would have helped him had his problems been caused by a mental handicap rather than a brain injury. The services he needed existed - just not for him.
The same is true for my young friend, who I suspect would thrive in some foster home on a farm, with lots of animals. But there’s no foster homes for grown-up girls like her.
Too young. Too old. Too high of an intellect. Not enough of a drug addict. Too loud, too crazy, too disastrous. The walls go up - ostensibly as a means of sorting people into the right boxes, but in reality a blatant denial of services to certain populations. Like my young friend, whose simple need for a home and a sense of belonging should not be beyond our capability to provide.
At least I know where she’ll be sleeping at night for these next few weeks, although my heart hurts to think of her there. She needs support, not imprisonment.
But sometimes jail is all there is.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
Jan. 28, 2006
A young woman who I’m very fond of was sentenced to four months in jail this week, and I cheered at the news. I high-fived my co-workers, who’d been hoping for jail time as well. It could have been a jubilant moment if it all wasn’t so damn sad.
The young woman is 23 going on six in some of the ways she relates to the world, and jail isn’t the right place for her. What she really needs is to be taken in by a warm, motherly woman who’d keep her fed, loved and busy for as long as it takes for her to get a grip on her life, even if she never does.
But there’s nothing like that in this world of ours for people like my young friend. She doesn’t quite fit in anybody’s box. And so it’s off to jail on a trafficking charge and the inevitable breaches, and me happy about it just for the chance to see her get a couple enforced months of nourishment and shelter - and hopefully, a break from cocaine.
If you knew her story, you would not be surprised at how it’s come to this, as her wounded life begins with a mother who drank while pregnant and carries on through poverty, family tragedy, her own early pregnancies and addiction. She has been homeless for the better part of two years now despite all the best efforts of local service agencies that support her, because the services that might help her in a more meaningful way simply don’t exist.
Life tends to teach most of us through trial and error. We do something that turns out badly and as a result, resolve not to do it again. But for people whose mothers drank while pregnant, that’s often not true. The part of the brain that governs judgment and impulse control is permanently damaged, as are other essential body systems. The children of drinking mothers are forever different, and in ways that don’t fit well in an uninformed and impatient society.
In an ideal world, it wouldn’t matter much. A problem would be looked at as a problem regardless of its root, and solved accordingly. The ongoing dilemma of my young friend’s life need not be her inescapable fate - all she needs is suitable services flexible enough to accommodate the person that she is.
Were her IQ below 70, there might be more help for her. Or if she was under 19 and could still be considered a child. The damage done to her brain by her mother’s drinking may one day be her ticket to services when the province launches its anticipated strategy for Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, but right now there’s barely a thing going on in terms of direct help.
And so there’s nothing for this young woman beyond the Band-Aid care of street-level social agencies, which can do little except to pick her up after every fall and pray that she survives the next one. If it weren’t for her street community and a network of pals at the agencies she visits, there would be no one in her life.
How can it be that I’m rooting for jail for her - me, the bleeding-heart liberal who can barely stand the way we use our jails at the best of times?
But that’s what it comes down to after you see someone you’re very fond of risking death every night on the streets, via any number of means. When the option is having somebody steal your cold, damp blanket right off your back while you’re shivering outside with the fever of staph infections ravaging your body, jail doesn’t look so bad.
Years ago, I talked to a woman with a brain-injured son who was trying to explain her immense frustration with a system that would have helped him had his problems been caused by a mental handicap rather than a brain injury. The services he needed existed - just not for him.
The same is true for my young friend, who I suspect would thrive in some foster home on a farm, with lots of animals. But there’s no foster homes for grown-up girls like her.
Too young. Too old. Too high of an intellect. Not enough of a drug addict. Too loud, too crazy, too disastrous. The walls go up - ostensibly as a means of sorting people into the right boxes, but in reality a blatant denial of services to certain populations. Like my young friend, whose simple need for a home and a sense of belonging should not be beyond our capability to provide.
At least I know where she’ll be sleeping at night for these next few weeks, although my heart hurts to think of her there. She needs support, not imprisonment.
But sometimes jail is all there is.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
Federal election
Jan. 20. 2006
Utne magazine has a distinct point of view, so bashing of the mainstream media in its pages is to be expected. What magazine with a vision to “make the world kinder and greener” could resist?
An article in February’s issue, “Ten Stories Ignored by the Mainstream Media,” is thus fairly predictable for Utne. Like most pieces about the media, the article hints at a media conspiracy in which the “real” news is being covered up.
I’m bored by talk of conspiracy theories. But a fact box on a different aspect of the media intrigued me. The subject was global warming.
In the decade leading up to 2003, the fact box noted, 928 peer-reviewed articles about global warming had run in scientific journals. None cast doubt on “human-caused global warming.”
Roughly during that same period,1988 to 2002, four of the biggest papers in the U.S. - the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal - published 3,543 stories in their news pages about global warming. Fifty-three per cent cast doubt on human behaviour being part of the problem.
That’s something worth thinking about. I don’t know by who, because you’d need a serious media think-tank in the wings before you could properly dwell on an issue like that - some mythical, wise, Solomon-like body looking out for the public interest. In all my years in journalism, I can’t say as I came across anything like that.
I think of news media as modern-day town criers. They gather up the messages and images of the day and then give us a selection of the ones they think we want. It’s an effective enough way to move along information in a day-to-day sort of way, but what goes unaccounted for is whether there’s any cumulative impact on a community from the town crier’s particular stream of messages.
Resolutely skeptical coverage by the media of global warming could, under such a scenario, warp public opinion to the point of affecting government policy, even in the face of conflicting scientific data. Or not, if media in fact are nowhere near that influential. The problem is, we’re just not sure.
Asked to speak on diversity in 2004 to a gathering of provincial press councils, I spent six weeks in the runup carefully counting images and tallying the race/gender balances in the Times-Colonist, Globe and Mail and Vancouver Sun - the morning reads at my house. I grew to hate the tally for taking all the fun out of reading the paper, but the findings were intriguing.
I won’t vouch for the scientific quality of my research - I just counted. White faces, brown faces. Men and women. I scanned letters to the editor for male and female names, and comment pieces as well. I counted stories built around conflict of some kinds, whether international wars or municipal brouhahas. There was nothing very standardized about any of it, and it was frequently quite subjective.
What was revealed by the exercise, however, was that news coverage and comment skewed white and male across the board. In the Vancouver Sun, only 29 per cent of the news images were of women, and it went down from there: 28 per cent at the TC, and 26 per cent at the Globe. The percentage of comment pieces written by men ranged from 77 per cent in the Globe to 79 per cent in the TC.
A similar count I did around race initially looked like the papers were paying serious attention to diversity. In terms of non-white faces, the Globe came in at 23 per cent - not bad, considering visible minorities make up just 13.4 per cent of the Canadian population. The TC came in at 22 per cent, in a region where the visible-minority population is a scant nine per cent. The Sun - 15 per cent non-white faces in a region where almost half the population fits that criterion - was the only obvious standout.
But were you to adjust for the slew of photos of black athletes (I did the count during the 2004 summer Olympics), desperate Iraqis, starving Sudanese and otherwise devastated ethnic minorities in lands far away, images of non-whites going about their lives in a Canadian community were uncommon in all three papers. Close to 60 per cent of stories featured conflict.
Does it mean anything? I guess that’s the big question. If nobody’s taking the media too seriously, then overly skeptical global-warming stories and male-heavy news coverage shouldn’t matter. But if it does, then even my imperfectly gleaned findings about media bias ring ominous.
While we wait to find out, a simple strategy: Eyes wide open. No conspiracy out there that I’ve ever seen, but that’s not to say that you’re getting the whole story.
Jan. 20. 2006
Utne magazine has a distinct point of view, so bashing of the mainstream media in its pages is to be expected. What magazine with a vision to “make the world kinder and greener” could resist?
An article in February’s issue, “Ten Stories Ignored by the Mainstream Media,” is thus fairly predictable for Utne. Like most pieces about the media, the article hints at a media conspiracy in which the “real” news is being covered up.
I’m bored by talk of conspiracy theories. But a fact box on a different aspect of the media intrigued me. The subject was global warming.
In the decade leading up to 2003, the fact box noted, 928 peer-reviewed articles about global warming had run in scientific journals. None cast doubt on “human-caused global warming.”
Roughly during that same period,1988 to 2002, four of the biggest papers in the U.S. - the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal - published 3,543 stories in their news pages about global warming. Fifty-three per cent cast doubt on human behaviour being part of the problem.
That’s something worth thinking about. I don’t know by who, because you’d need a serious media think-tank in the wings before you could properly dwell on an issue like that - some mythical, wise, Solomon-like body looking out for the public interest. In all my years in journalism, I can’t say as I came across anything like that.
I think of news media as modern-day town criers. They gather up the messages and images of the day and then give us a selection of the ones they think we want. It’s an effective enough way to move along information in a day-to-day sort of way, but what goes unaccounted for is whether there’s any cumulative impact on a community from the town crier’s particular stream of messages.
Resolutely skeptical coverage by the media of global warming could, under such a scenario, warp public opinion to the point of affecting government policy, even in the face of conflicting scientific data. Or not, if media in fact are nowhere near that influential. The problem is, we’re just not sure.
Asked to speak on diversity in 2004 to a gathering of provincial press councils, I spent six weeks in the runup carefully counting images and tallying the race/gender balances in the Times-Colonist, Globe and Mail and Vancouver Sun - the morning reads at my house. I grew to hate the tally for taking all the fun out of reading the paper, but the findings were intriguing.
I won’t vouch for the scientific quality of my research - I just counted. White faces, brown faces. Men and women. I scanned letters to the editor for male and female names, and comment pieces as well. I counted stories built around conflict of some kinds, whether international wars or municipal brouhahas. There was nothing very standardized about any of it, and it was frequently quite subjective.
What was revealed by the exercise, however, was that news coverage and comment skewed white and male across the board. In the Vancouver Sun, only 29 per cent of the news images were of women, and it went down from there: 28 per cent at the TC, and 26 per cent at the Globe. The percentage of comment pieces written by men ranged from 77 per cent in the Globe to 79 per cent in the TC.
A similar count I did around race initially looked like the papers were paying serious attention to diversity. In terms of non-white faces, the Globe came in at 23 per cent - not bad, considering visible minorities make up just 13.4 per cent of the Canadian population. The TC came in at 22 per cent, in a region where the visible-minority population is a scant nine per cent. The Sun - 15 per cent non-white faces in a region where almost half the population fits that criterion - was the only obvious standout.
But were you to adjust for the slew of photos of black athletes (I did the count during the 2004 summer Olympics), desperate Iraqis, starving Sudanese and otherwise devastated ethnic minorities in lands far away, images of non-whites going about their lives in a Canadian community were uncommon in all three papers. Close to 60 per cent of stories featured conflict.
Does it mean anything? I guess that’s the big question. If nobody’s taking the media too seriously, then overly skeptical global-warming stories and male-heavy news coverage shouldn’t matter. But if it does, then even my imperfectly gleaned findings about media bias ring ominous.
While we wait to find out, a simple strategy: Eyes wide open. No conspiracy out there that I’ve ever seen, but that’s not to say that you’re getting the whole story.
Media
Jan. 9, 2006
Utne magazine has a distinct point of view, so bashing of the mainstream media in its pages is to be expected. What magazine with a vision to “make the world kinder and greener” could resist?
An article in February’s issue, “Ten Stories Ignored by the Mainstream Media,” is thus fairly predictable for Utne. Like most pieces about the media, the article hints at a media conspiracy in which the “real” news is being covered up.
I’m bored by talk of conspiracy theories. But a fact box on a different aspect of the media intrigued me. The subject was global warming.
In the decade leading up to 2003, the fact box noted, 928 peer-reviewed articles about global warming had run in scientific journals. None cast doubt on “human-caused global warming.”
Roughly during that same period,1988 to 2002, four of the biggest papers in the U.S. - the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal - published 3,543 stories in their news pages about global warming. Fifty-three per cent cast doubt on human behaviour being part of the problem.
That’s something worth thinking about. I don’t know by who, because you’d need a serious media think-tank in the wings before you could properly dwell on an issue like that - some mythical, wise, Solomon-like body looking out for the public interest. In all my years in journalism, I can’t say as I came across anything like that.
I think of news media as modern-day town criers. They gather up the messages and images of the day and then give us a selection of the ones they think we want. It’s an effective enough way to move along information in a day-to-day sort of way, but what goes unaccounted for is whether there’s any cumulative impact on a community from the town crier’s particular stream of messages.
Resolutely skeptical coverage by the media of global warming could, under such a scenario, warp public opinion to the point of affecting government policy, even in the face of conflicting scientific data. Or not, if media in fact are nowhere near that influential. The problem is, we’re just not sure.
Asked to speak on diversity in 2004 to a gathering of provincial press councils, I spent six weeks in the runup carefully counting images and tallying the race/gender balances in the Times-Colonist, Globe and Mail and Vancouver Sun - the morning reads at my house. I grew to hate the tally for taking all the fun out of reading the paper, but the findings were intriguing.
I won’t vouch for the scientific quality of my research - I just counted. White faces, brown faces. Men and women. I scanned letters to the editor for male and female names, and comment pieces as well. I counted stories built around conflict of some kinds, whether international wars or municipal brouhahas. There was nothing very standardized about any of it, and it was frequently quite subjective.
What was revealed by the exercise, however, was that news coverage and comment skewed white and male across the board. In the Vancouver Sun, only 29 per cent of the news images were of women, and it went down from there: 28 per cent at the TC, and 26 per cent at the Globe. The percentage of comment pieces written by men ranged from 77 per cent in the Globe to 79 per cent in the TC.
A similar count I did around race initially looked like the papers were paying serious attention to diversity. In terms of non-white faces, the Globe came in at 23 per cent - not bad, considering visible minorities make up just 13.4 per cent of the Canadian population. The TC came in at 22 per cent, in a region where the visible-minority population is a scant nine per cent. The Sun - 15 per cent non-white faces in a region where almost half the population fits that criterion - was the only obvious standout.
But were you to adjust for the slew of photos of black athletes (I did the count during the 2004 summer Olympics), desperate Iraqis, starving Sudanese and otherwise devastated ethnic minorities in lands far away, images of non-whites going about their lives in a Canadian community were uncommon in all three papers. Close to 60 per cent of stories featured conflict.
Does it mean anything? I guess that’s the big question. If nobody’s taking the media too seriously, then overly skeptical global-warming stories and male-heavy news coverage shouldn’t matter. But if it does, then even my imperfectly gleaned findings about media bias ring ominous.
While we wait to find out, a simple strategy: Eyes wide open. No conspiracy out there that I’ve ever seen, but that’s not to say that you’re getting the whole story.
Jan. 9, 2006
Utne magazine has a distinct point of view, so bashing of the mainstream media in its pages is to be expected. What magazine with a vision to “make the world kinder and greener” could resist?
An article in February’s issue, “Ten Stories Ignored by the Mainstream Media,” is thus fairly predictable for Utne. Like most pieces about the media, the article hints at a media conspiracy in which the “real” news is being covered up.
I’m bored by talk of conspiracy theories. But a fact box on a different aspect of the media intrigued me. The subject was global warming.
In the decade leading up to 2003, the fact box noted, 928 peer-reviewed articles about global warming had run in scientific journals. None cast doubt on “human-caused global warming.”
Roughly during that same period,1988 to 2002, four of the biggest papers in the U.S. - the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal - published 3,543 stories in their news pages about global warming. Fifty-three per cent cast doubt on human behaviour being part of the problem.
That’s something worth thinking about. I don’t know by who, because you’d need a serious media think-tank in the wings before you could properly dwell on an issue like that - some mythical, wise, Solomon-like body looking out for the public interest. In all my years in journalism, I can’t say as I came across anything like that.
I think of news media as modern-day town criers. They gather up the messages and images of the day and then give us a selection of the ones they think we want. It’s an effective enough way to move along information in a day-to-day sort of way, but what goes unaccounted for is whether there’s any cumulative impact on a community from the town crier’s particular stream of messages.
Resolutely skeptical coverage by the media of global warming could, under such a scenario, warp public opinion to the point of affecting government policy, even in the face of conflicting scientific data. Or not, if media in fact are nowhere near that influential. The problem is, we’re just not sure.
Asked to speak on diversity in 2004 to a gathering of provincial press councils, I spent six weeks in the runup carefully counting images and tallying the race/gender balances in the Times-Colonist, Globe and Mail and Vancouver Sun - the morning reads at my house. I grew to hate the tally for taking all the fun out of reading the paper, but the findings were intriguing.
I won’t vouch for the scientific quality of my research - I just counted. White faces, brown faces. Men and women. I scanned letters to the editor for male and female names, and comment pieces as well. I counted stories built around conflict of some kinds, whether international wars or municipal brouhahas. There was nothing very standardized about any of it, and it was frequently quite subjective.
What was revealed by the exercise, however, was that news coverage and comment skewed white and male across the board. In the Vancouver Sun, only 29 per cent of the news images were of women, and it went down from there: 28 per cent at the TC, and 26 per cent at the Globe. The percentage of comment pieces written by men ranged from 77 per cent in the Globe to 79 per cent in the TC.
A similar count I did around race initially looked like the papers were paying serious attention to diversity. In terms of non-white faces, the Globe came in at 23 per cent - not bad, considering visible minorities make up just 13.4 per cent of the Canadian population. The TC came in at 22 per cent, in a region where the visible-minority population is a scant nine per cent. The Sun - 15 per cent non-white faces in a region where almost half the population fits that criterion - was the only obvious standout.
But were you to adjust for the slew of photos of black athletes (I did the count during the 2004 summer Olympics), desperate Iraqis, starving Sudanese and otherwise devastated ethnic minorities in lands far away, images of non-whites going about their lives in a Canadian community were uncommon in all three papers. Close to 60 per cent of stories featured conflict.
Does it mean anything? I guess that’s the big question. If nobody’s taking the media too seriously, then overly skeptical global-warming stories and male-heavy news coverage shouldn’t matter. But if it does, then even my imperfectly gleaned findings about media bias ring ominous.
While we wait to find out, a simple strategy: Eyes wide open. No conspiracy out there that I’ve ever seen, but that’s not to say that you’re getting the whole story.
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