Showing posts with label musings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label musings. Show all posts

Thursday, January 04, 2024

Jan. 5, 1974: A wedding story


On this night 50 years ago, I was preparing for my wedding the next day. I was barely two weeks past my 17th birthday.

What was on my mind that evening? No recollection. I know I wasn’t scared or sad – then and now, I’ve always been up for an adventure, and I’d been eager to get out of my parents’ house for at least a couple of years by that point. (They were good people, but I so desperately wanted independence.)

My memories of the weeks around the wedding are like snapshots more than anything. I remember a glimpse of this, a few seconds of that. It’s never big stuff I recall, just these quirky little bits that linger.

Me enjoying the fuss of all the big community bridal showers that a girl got when she married a Cumberland boy in those years. Cakes shaped and iced like a Barbie doll's ball gown. Me in the mirror for the first time in my wedding dress, appreciating its low cut. The purple everything in the honeymoon suite of the Port Augusta Motel.

Us splurging for two nights in the Bayshore Hotel in Vancouver for a honeymoon, strolling past the fur-coat stores and the fancy art and eating steak in Trader Vic’s. I’d never known such luxury. Me sitting topless at the little table in our oceanfront room, carefully colouring a new doodle art that my husband had gotten me.

I smoked back then, and if I’m being honest, one of the things that excited me most about getting married was that I would now be free to smoke whenever I wanted. It’s that kind of memory that brings home to me what a kid I was. Not one clue about the actual realities of being a wife - and soon enough, a mom. I was just thinking yay, now I get to smoke.

I suppose that marrying while still a child would seem like a hard start to adulthood to a lot of people. But was it? Looking back over the rich 50 years that I’ve had since then, what would I do differently? Who would I have been if I hadn’t been the girl making adult decisions at 17? How many of the amazing experiences that I’ve had were made possible because I was that girl?

I didn’t get to do that young-person-backpacking thing, and I admit that I probably would have loved that experience. I also have a very poignant memory of observing the teen scene in Penticton on one long-ago summer holiday with a baby on my hip, and feeling such longing to have had the chance to be the girl in the cool car cruising with all the boys, good tunes on the radio.

But 50 years on, I know that it all comes to you sooner or later anyway. Whatever you missed here, you’ll make up there. (OK, maybe not the Penticton teen scene. But you’ll get some version of being the cool, wild girl at some point in your life, if that’s what you want.)

Spoiler alert: The marriage won't work out for those children standing up together in Courtenay’s United Church on Jan. 5, 1974, Rev. Ray Brandon presiding. There will be no special anniversary cake, no gold mylar balloon in the shape of 50.

Though it’s not like divorce is the end of the story. We had children, and then they grew up and had children of their own. We are attached for a lifetime and beyond by those dear creatures who we both love without measure. My ex-husband is literally the only person in the world who loves my children with as much passion as I do. That is an unbreakable bond.

Tonight, 50 years ago. Did I have butterflies? Did I hang out with my besties, all of whom were in the wedding? Did I play 45s on the stereo in my room and celebrate my last night in the family home? If my mom were still alive, she’d recall every detail of it. “Oh, Jody, how can you not remember?” she’d scold.

Just two days ago, I remembered the sparkly blue dress that my mother wore to my wedding. Three years later, I’d wear it myself to a New Year’s Eve dance at the CRI Hall, when I was really pregnant. I danced so much that our daughter was born three weeks early.

Tomorrow, 50 years ago. The bridesmaids will wear royal blue, and the groomsmen will be in rented matching tuxes with that kind of flocked pattern that was popular in a wedding tux back then. There will be candles in the church, and my dad will have to work hard to hide his stricken look, though it shows up in some of the photos.

And just like that, I will be an adult. And it will all turn out OK.


Saturday, February 18, 2023

When the end-of-days feelings get you down, choose up

Indri Robyy, Pixabay

Doom-scrolling is real, and I know to try to avoid it for fear of entering that hyper-vigilant, chronically worried state that can set in when your adrenal system gets worked up. But these days it's hard to find a news feed of any kind that doesn't feel like doom-scrolling. 

Historians hasten to put such gloomy thoughts about "these times" in perspective. They rightly note that in fact, many grand woes of the world are actually lessening. We have less poverty. Fewer nuclear warheads. Less global terrorism. We live longer, having invented cures, treatments and vaccines for many things that used to kill us.

All of that is good news at the big-picture level. But it isn't actually of much comfort to those who are alive in this moment and living in this destabilized state, when flu-stricken birds are falling out of the sky and the Earth is splitting open and every season heralds a new round of record-smashing extreme weather somewhere in the world.  

It's hard to appreciate your moment in time in the Big Picture when your Small Picture is scaring the hell out of you. 

Some of us are living in hellish situations of war and natural disaster while others are just stressed from reading about it, and I don't mean to compare the experiences. But I'd venture that all eight billion of us are feeling the heaviness of these times in one way or another. 

We all need to find our own ways of coping. Some people "check out" and simply don't take in the news, a tempting thought if only our collective alarm wasn't urgently needed to drive change. Nothing gets fixed when people check out. 

Others focus on the here and now. There's no earthquake in Victoria right now, is there? There's no balloon waiting to be shot down in our skies. No sabre-rattling super power getting jacked up about Canada. There's just you and the calm seas and the pretty paper whites, on a mild winter day on a coveted West Coast island.

I like "being present" myself, though I did discover on a road trip last year through California's drought-slammed former nut orchards that it also means bearing witness to whatever is playing out in front of you. 

Driving south through lands I once dreamed of living in only to be confronted with the realities of modern-day California - so, so different from my shiny young-person memories of thriving agriculture as far as the eye could seen and a full-to-the-brim Lake Shasta packed with happy house boaters - was an eye-opener that I haven't been able to shake.

Nor will being present lower stress levels when it involves passing through the pockets of poverty and human suffering that have developed in all of our communities. But it couldn't be more important to be present in those moments, because this hand-wringing state we've been in about social decline for pretty much 30 years now will end only when we shake ourselves awake and act. 

Another reaction to these unsettling times is to go all in, spiralling into an increasing state of rage and paranoia over whatever subject a person has ended up fixated on. 

With so much to fixate on, there are many ways to rage these days. I'm sure we all know someone who has fallen into obsession (and whose company we want less and less of as a result). I know a COVID rager, an anti-vax rager, several Trudeau ragers, and even a few pro-Trump ragers who ignited a few years back and can't seem to cool down.

Unfortunately, there's no problem-fixing going on when people are in a state of rage. That's just a time when we want to break things and yell at people. If you're stuck in a rage state, best to get some help with that. It's costing you friends and your personal health, and not changing a damn thing about whatever has you riled.

How does one go about feeling better in gloomy times? Personally, I seek out news stories about things that are making a difference on the issues facing us. A recent read reminding me that the world did successfully address acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer through collective action was heartening, and important to hold onto in times when all the doom threatens to paralyze us. 

Also good: Buy a copy of The Economist every now and again and get caught up on world news  presented with careful balance, research and thoughtfulness. So different than the hyped-up headlines that a Google News search pulls up.

Speaking of news, I highly recommend severely limiting your intake of that which calls itself "news" in these over-saturated times. 

Back in the day when newspapers were still a thing, I read two a day, mostly limited to goings-on in Victoria, BC and Canada. Now, every bit of bad news going on anywhere in the world is as close as a right-hand swipe on my phone. 

It's so easy to do that swipe in a distracted moment, just like I once used to mindlessly light up a cigarette to pass the time in between this and that. But just like those cigarettes, it's so bad for me. I can feel the worry and the outrage building in me almost immediately, even if I was having a perfectly OK time just minutes before. 

Of course, each of us as citizens of the world also need to be stepping up right now. Avoiding the bad news overload is one thing, but taking action where you can must never be avoided. If you've got anyone you care about who is still going to carry on living after you're dead, surely that's motivation enough to do your part right now to actually address problems where you can rather than just worry about them.

Find the news you can use, and use it. May the rest of it roll off you.

Friday, January 29, 2010

Disgrace can't erase Fonyo's accomplishments

Poor Steve Fonyo. Something about that guy just breaks my heart.
Few things are more painful to watch than a long and very public fall from grace. Fonyo’s fall has been more painful than most, because he really was just an ordinary teen trying to do something positive when he set out to run across the country in 1984.
He accomplished something quite miraculous. Not only did he run all the way from St. John’s, Nfld. to Victoria - 7,294 kilometres in all - but he raised $13 million for the Canadian Cancer Society along the way. And it all took place just five years after Fonyo lost his leg to cancer at age 12.
Canadians loved Fonyo, at least for a little while. But he soon began to try our affections, starting with a drunk-driving conviction in 1987 and then a seemingly endless series of criminal convictions over the next 22 years for things like shoplifting, driving without a licence, and fraud.
The latest humiliation came this week, when Fonyo was stripped of his 1985 Order of Canada. He’s one of just four people to be removed from the Order in its 42-year history. For his sins, he now shares a place in Canadian history with NHL players’ agent Alan Eagleson, aboriginal leader David Ahenakew, and lawyer Sher Singh, all deemed to have brought the Order into disrepute through bad behaviour or criminal activities.
Timing is everything, and it’s unfortunate that in the period when Fonyo was preparing for his run, Canadians needed more than just a plucky one-legged teen running across the country for cancer. We needed a hero.
Terry Fox’s tragic story had captured the nation just three years earlier. We wanted Fonyo to be everything that Fox had seemed destined for.
Who could meet such a tall order? Certainly not Fonyo, who was just a kid when he suddenly found himself elevated to hero status following his 14-month run. He achieved what Fox had not been able to do (Fox died a year into his run), but couldn’t possibly live up to the myth.
Even the $13 million Fonyo raised with his cross-Canada Journey For Lives pales in comparison with the $24 million that Fox raised without ever completing his run, let alone the hundreds of millions raised in Fox’s memory since his death.
Fonyo enjoyed a few heady months caught up in the whirl of fame - riding in red Ferraris with George Harrison; meeting the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev and Pope John Paul; receiving the Order of Canada at the tender age of 18. But real life is no fairy tale, and Fonyo’s brief time in the limelight was over soon enough.
He tried to kick-start things again in 1987 with another fundraising run, this time across the United Kingdom. But the disastrous run raised just $115,000 and left Fonyo deep in debt.
His first conviction for drunk driving came later that same year, right around the time his car was seized due to unpaid bills. He was 20 years old and $36,000 in debt.
His ongoing problems with drugs and alcohol have been well-documented by the Canadian media. In fact, every bump in the road that Fonyo has encountered in the last two decades has been well-documented, to the point that it’s now the drunk and disorderly side of Fonyo that springs most easily to mind whenever his name comes up. The hero is no more.
What can you wish for a man like Fonyo?
We liked him well enough when he was a kid with a disability and a simple and compelling dream. But the full-grown man - warts and all - has been much harder to warm up to. His years of criminal behaviour have doubtlessly hurt many people, and he has put countless lives at risk by repeatedly driving drunk and without a licence.
Still, he did something amazing once upon a time. He’s a small-town B.C. boy who raised a staggering amount of money for cancer, and is still the only one-legged runner in history to run across Canada. I hope he still hangs onto the memory of that proud achievement in the midst of his latest disgrace.
Fonyo was reportedly devastated when he found out he was to be removed from the Order of Canada. A former boss at a Surrey auto-repair shop told the Vancouver Sun this week that it just seems wrong to do that to Fonyo.
“They gave him the Order of Canada based on his accomplishments, and they’re still there. It’s not like he didn’t do it, or lied about it,” says Satnam Singh Sidhu. “He finished his marathon and was an inspiration to a lot of people.”

Wednesday, December 30, 2009


Singing the praises of making music

The teeny little house on Woods Avenue in Courtenay is still there. I have a flash of a memory of learning my first Christmas carols at the piano in that house, where my teacher Kay Wilson lived. I was 10.
Kay and my determined mother gave me one of the greatest gifts of my life starting that day - the longing to make music. I’m reminded of such things this year more than most, what with music being such a major part of my life again in all kinds of unexpected ways.
If I could recommend one thing to add to your busy 2010 schedule, it’s this: Make music. Help your children make music. Having the ability and opportunity to create music has been a wondrous thing for me, and I wish it for everyone for the joy it brings.
Learning the piano was years of hard slogging, I admit. I’d love to tell you that I laid my hands on the keyboard for the first time and the rest was glorious history; the truth is that I’ve always had to practise long and hard. I was ready to quit when I was a tempestuous 14-year-old, but to my great fortune Kay and my mother ganged up on me and wouldn’t allow it.
Effort notwithstanding, the journey has been amazing. When I make music, all is right with the world - for an hour at least, or maybe even a whole lingering afternoon if I’ve got the time for it. How many things can you say that about?
Learning music has also turned out to be a fine primer for life. It taught me that the way to get better at something is to practise, and that most problems can be sorted out if you just take things slow. I learned the discipline of doing something every day even when I didn’t feel like it, and that the magic would find its way to me even on bad days if I just kept playing.
Music is all about that magic, of course.
I remember how it felt to be able to play Away in a Manger for the first time, my hands performing miracles before my very eyes. I still feel that same rush for every new piece of music I learn. And nowadays my musical discoveries might just as easily involve something other than the piano, because the other great gift music gives you is the ability to go in different directions.
A long-time classical pianist, I never would have expected to be jamming tunes from the 1930s and ‘40s with my daughter at our now-regular gigs at local retirement facilities. But I am.
I wouldn’t have expected to be playing French musettes on the accordion, either. But I’m doing that, too, and got my busker’s licence this past summer solely for the pleasure of playing the accordion outdoors. And I’m three happy years into my first real “band” experience, playing taiko drums with Victoria’s Uminari ensemble.
I fear the modern time, where it’s possible to walk through a home and not see a single instrument. Or where music in the schools is viewed as “discretionary,” and its absence denies children their moment of discovery. Music and art truly are the universal languages, and no child should miss out on such a profound way to experience the emotion and beauty of the world.
The very good thing about music is that it’s there for whoever wants it. Nerve-wracking recitals and conservatory exams gave me a healthy sense of my own limitations - another excellent life lesson - and I knew early on that I had neither the natural brilliance nor practise habits to become the next Glenn Gould. But hey, I can still make some pretty good music.
That said, the lesson I’ve learned lately is that sometimes you need to let go of your limitations and just jump into the deep end anyway. Set your mind and best practise habits on achieving something that looks out of reach, and there’s no saying where it might lead you. Thank you to my youngest daughter Rachelle for breaking me out of 40 years of certainty that I couldn’t sing harmony.
You don’t have to be rich to bring music into your life, either. If lessons are out of the question, scrounge up a used instrument or two and see what happens. Open your mouth and sing. Tap that place inside you that’s going to light up like the proverbial Christmas tree when it gets the chance to make music.
Happy New Year, everyone. May the beat go on.

Friday, December 18, 2009


Shut off the phone, pack up the 'Berry, and be here now

It’s my birthday today, and I don’t want an iPhone.
I don’t want an iPod Touch either, or anything that looks or acts like a Blackberry. I’ve even got mixed feelings about having a cell phone, especially now that I won’t be able to use it in the car anyway.
I can’t bear the ads for “world at your fingertips” devices, in which people are depicted having unbelievable amounts of fun interacting with their phones. Have you seen the one where the young guy is sitting in a coffee shop “getting caught up with” half a dozen friends, none of whom are actually there?
It’s the new norm, to be present without actually being there. You think you’re sharing a meal with someone, but then their cell phone rings and you’re forgotten. You go to a meeting and count 20 people in attendance, but then realize that half are covert Blackberry users who aren’t paying a lick of attention.
I’m not a devout practitioner of Eastern mysticism by any means, but whatever happened to “be here now?”
Author Ram Dass coined that particular phrase in his 1971 pop-culture classic about spiritual enlightenment, Remember Be Here Now. But the concept at the core of the book - mindfulness - has been a teaching of ancient Asian religions for many centuries.
More and more these days, we live at the opposite end of mindfulness. Technology has given us the ability to fracture our attentions instantaneously in a dozen or more directions. And we seem only too happy to go along, with little thought to what is lost along the way.
This is not to rail against technological advances, which have broadened our ability to communicate across any barrier. I love technology.
But we’re on this Earth for such a short time. I puzzle over why we choose to spend so much of it in a haze of texting, sexting, tweeting, updating, emailing and cyber-chatting, even while the moment we’re actually existing in slips by unnoticed.
I’m 53 today. If I live to age 82 - the average lifespan of a British Columbian woman - I have just 29 Christmases left after this one. I have but 348 summer weekends left to enjoy.
Time passes at a breathless pace at this age. It can only go faster now that I’ve reached the age where 24 hours is worth half of what it was back when I was 25.
(Do the math and it turns out that each day at age 53 is equivalent to .2 per cent of the days you have left to live presuming an average lifespan, compared to .1 per cent at age 25. Yikes.)
I’m glad to be alive at a time when it’s possible to share music, photos, videos and thought processes at lightning speed with the whole wide world. It’s downright awe-inspiring to ponder the creativity and imagination of the people coming up with all this stuff, and the impact it has had on our culture.
But the precious days that make up a life are made up of precious minutes, and you can fritter away far too many of them on cyber-communications with people you didn’t really want to communicate with in the first place. Meanwhile, life unfolds around you and you’re half-aware at best - present in body but definitely not in mind.
I wouldn’t suggest that a life lived in a state of distraction could bring harm to people, of course. But I do know that I don’t want my own life to pass that way. The older I get, the more certain I become that every day is a gift and every experience worthy - and best savoured when body, heart and mind are all in the same room.
We have such a difficult time living in the now. Our lunch hours are spent with a Blackberry beside us on the table, its constant beeps and buzzes disrupting conversation and restaurant ambience even when we do our best to ignore it. We sit in coffee shops alone but never lonely, our headsets cranked up and our laptops open.
Do we remember who sat next to us? What we ate? Whether the barista looked like she could use a friend? How many potentially interesting moments came and went without us even looking up? How many experiences did we miss out on? Day after precious day slips by, with only the number of messages and phone calls received that day to distinguish one from the other.
Life’s short. Don’t waste a minute of it. Be here now.

Monday, July 06, 2009

Wish I'd seized the moment to know my grandmother better

My mother didn’t give me much choice about attending family reunions when I was younger, and there were times in years past when I wasn’t too happy about that. I love my family, but long summer treks to Saskatchewan weren’t necessarily my idea of a good time.
But somewhere along the line, I got hooked. I can’t remember the exact reunion when it all clicked in, but I recall looking around at my many cousins as we made merry and thinking how incredible it was that we barely knew each other, had grown up thousands of miles away, and yet all had stories in common of our quirky grandmother.
That connection is very much on my mind this week, because the aunts and the uncles and the cousins are all in town at this very moment for a family reunion in Victoria. Chances are I’m swapping Grandma Chow stories with some of them even as you’re reading this.
Mary Feica was a Romanian teenager who married Chinese immigrant Charles Chow in 1910 in Moose Jaw, Sask. They’d met when my grandmother got a job working at the restaurant my grandfather managed.
The circumstances of that marriage alone, at a time when few things could have been more scandalous, have made for many happy hours of chatty speculation for me and my cousins. But there’s much more than that to the life of Mary and Charles Chow and their nine very interesting children, so we’re never short of things to talk about.
I have no memory of my grandfather, as he died the year I was born. But Grandma Chow lived until 1979 and was a regular visitor to our house during my childhood. She was a traveller without a home base in the years when I have the clearest memories of her, moving from one relative’s house to another for extended periods.
Oh, the things I wish I’d asked her during the times when she stayed with us. She was a woman who lived against the tenets of her time on a number of fronts, and if she was here before me now I’d have a million questions for her about what that was like. (Every now and then, the cousins get to talking about how we’ll write a book about our grandparents.)
But wouldn’t you know, I wasn’t interested in Grandma Chow’s stories in the years when she was visiting. I was a kid, and then a self-absorbed teenager, and then off on my own adventures. My memories of her are only of an elderly woman with a heavy accent and thick eyeglasses, humming tuneless melodies as she moved around our kitchen making something strange to eat.
Such a lost opportunity. I’m thankful that one of my cousins is trying to fill in some of the gaps in our family knowledge by interviewing the three surviving Chow children - my mother Helen, her sister Joan, and baby brother Eddie. But I wish I’d had the foresight to be more curious with Grandma Chow herself when I had the chance, as I’m sadly certain that she would have been happy to have been asked.
It’s not so much the geography of her life that interests me - lived here or there, worked at this job or that. I’d like to know those details too, of course, but what I really want to know is what it was like to be her.
Nine children, a language barrier with her own husband, the death of a young son, years of poverty during the Depression - Mary, how did you endure it? She made choices throughout her life that would have brought tremendous judgment down on her at the time(sorry - you’ll have to wait for the book for more details), and yet she just kept putting one foot ahead of the other and carrying on.
I see her legacy in all of us Chow cousins. There’s no shortage of skeletons in the closet when it comes to our family, but we’re a tough-minded, passionate, independent bunch who know how to carry on. I’m proud to be the descendent of a strong, resilient woman who lived a life in full.
The good thing about regular family reunions is that the people who attend eventually develop their own shared history just from being at all those reunions. Grandma Chow remains a favourite subject, but now we’ve got our own tangled lives and crazy stories from previous reunions to add to the mix.
A big thanks to my Auntie Joan and cousins Tracy and Toni for making this weekend’s reunion happen. Chow family, party on.

Epilogue on July 7: Family reunion was a blast! Next reunion: Summer of 2012 in Three Hills, Alta.

Friday, June 05, 2009

Confessions of a disease vector

Like many other Greater Victorians, I caught a bug recently and am sick this week.
I doubt it’s the infamous “swine flu,” seeing as any number of more common colds and flus are hanging around out there right now. But for a moment let’s pretend that it is, if only for the purposes of demonstrating that there isn’t a sniff of hope in these modern times for containing the spread of new viruses.
The new H1N1 flu is contagious 24 hours before you show any symptoms and for at least seven days after you get sick, as are all flu viruses. That means I was contagious as of last Saturday.
That was the day I was shopping in Seattle with my daughter and stepdaughter. We were jammed into the basement of Nordstrom Rack with at least a thousand other women over the course of the afternoon. I can’t imagine how many articles of clothing I handled that day - how many hangers I jostled, changing-room doors I pushed open, people I brushed up against while engaging in the intense contact sport of discount shopping.
That night, I went to a packed restaurant full of Saturday-night revellers and beautiful young people in prom clothes, out celebrating their high-school grad. I hugged a friend from Seattle who had joined us for dinner, and we all shared an appetizer that involved us breaking off pieces of flatbread and dipping it in a single dish of melted cheese. I spent the night in a very small hotel room with my daughters, both of whom were already sick with some cold-like illness.
On Sunday, my stepdaughter flew back home to England, taking whatever bug she had - and perhaps mine, too - onto two planes, through three airports, and aboard a train ride to Exeter. My other daughter and I spent the morning weaving through throngs of tourists and locals packed into Pike Street Market, then went on to more discount shopping at the bustling outlet mall near the Tulalip Casino.
My credit card passed from me to a store clerk and back again any number of times over the weekend. I shared pens, passed along my passport at the border, handled a whole lot of merchandise in a whole lot of stores. I took a busy BC Ferry back to Victoria on Sunday night.
You get the picture: I shared public space with large numbers of people before I even knew I was sick. I know now, of course, which should mean I’ll take steps to avoid infecting anyone from this point on. But here we stumble into another unworkable theory for flu management: That people will stay home for seven days after the onset of symptoms to prevent the spread of the virus.
Are there people who can just close up their lives for seven days due to possibly having the flu? I know I can’t.
For one thing, I’m self-employed, which means no paid sick time. But even when I did have that fringe benefit, there was no way I would have stayed home for seven days straight just because I thought I had the flu. The truth is that people work through sickness all the time, and the modern workplace depends on it.
On the bright side, I work at home, sans co-workers. But I’ve got two contracts hitting deadlines over the next two weeks, and they require me to get out there and meet with people, flu or no flu. My plan: A couple Dayquils when needed and onward into my regular life, albeit with a bit more attention to hand-washing and avoiding close spaces.
The flu experts want me to wear a mask if I have to go out in public. Maybe I’d consider that if knew absolutely that I had some virulent flu strain and not just a garden-variety cold.
But therein lies the other difficult aspect of controlling the spread of influenza: How often do any of us actually know that we even have a confirmed case of the flu? It’s my opinion that I’ve had the flu many times in my lifetime, but I’ve never gone for a blood test to confirm any of it. Health officials anticipate confirming as few as five per cent of the H1N1 cases currently spreading around the world.
A pandemic strategy is a good thing, of course, and I’m glad for all the stockpiled Tamiflu and scientists working away on new vaccines. But best practice and human habits are leagues apart when it comes to spreading the flu. Eat your veggies and hope for the best, because avoiding each other simply isn’t an option.

Friday, January 23, 2009

Goodbye, Stan - you'll be missed

Twenty-eight years ago, on one of the worst nights of my life, Stan Hagen was there for me.
I’ve never forgotten his random act of kindness that April evening at the Nanaimo White Spot, and only wish I’d told him that before he died this week.
We ran into each other fairly regularly over the years, and the first thought in my head every time was of the night at the White Spot. I always wanted to tell him that there was a special place in my heart for him, because he was so kind to me at a time when I was utterly devastated. But wouldn’t you know it, I never did.
We were different people in those days. I was a young piano teacher in Courtenay, in what turned out to be the dying days of my first marriage. He owned a cement plant in town and was raising a happy, clamorous young family of five with his wife Judy.
I knew Stan and Judy because I taught piano to two of their children. We weren’t close pals by any means, but we exchanged pleasantries at the door whenever they brought their kids for piano lessons, and they were regulars at the twice-yearly piano recitals I held in my living room for my little clutch of students.
That night at the White Spot, I was on the run: from my marriage; from the Comox Valley; from the terrible question of whether I should leave my kids behind. I had driven down Island that April evening in a wild and grief-filled panic, knowing only that I needed to get out of town for a night and think.
For reasons I can no longer remember, I’d checked into an unpleasant little motel in an industrial part of Parksville. (It’s still there, and I still can’t drive past it without cringing.) I can’t imagine why I decided to go to the Nanaimo White Spot for dinner, but I suppose it was a familiar place, and God knows I needed comfort.
I walked in and there was Stan, eating by himself. He asked if I wanted to sit with him. If I’d been a bolder type, I probably would have said no, because just about the last thing I wanted at that moment was to have to make polite small talk with the dad of one of my piano students.
But I couldn’t bring myself to be so rude, so I joined him.
He was a religious man, and I was reluctant to answer the inevitable question about what brought me to Nanaimo that night. I was worried he’d judge me for leaving my marriage, let alone contemplating leaving my children, too.
But I was too young and wounded to be able to pull together a quick cover story, and pretty soon I’d told him what brought me there. The funny thing is, I don’t really remember anything of the conversation that followed, except that Stan listened without one shred of judgment.
I left the restaurant a couple hours later deeply grateful for his brief company, and feeling better equipped to deal with the painful decisions I faced.
I didn’t see Stan again for probably five years, by which time our lives had changed dramatically. It was 1986 and I was a reporter in Kamloops, covering the education beat for the Kamloops Sentinel. Stan was a provincial politician, and the minister of advanced education.
I’ll never forget the look on the faces of his aides on the day he and I met up again, during one of Stan’s first visits to Kamloops as a new cabinet minister. It’s not often you see a cabinet minister hugging a journalist, and we laughed at how our lives had ended up intersecting yet again.
As would become the pattern from that point on whenever we ran into each other, the conversation quickly turned to the years when I taught his girls piano, and the many musical adventures they’d embarked on since then. He loved to bring me up to speed on their accomplishments.
I don’t know what it is about certain people, but our paths continued to intersect in surprising ways. Piano dad when I was a piano teacher, cabinet minister when I was a journalist, minister of child and family development for much of the time when I was working in the non-profit sector - Stan was always cropping up in my life. After I moved to Victoria, we’d meet up maybe once a year to have lunch together, and almost never talked politics.
I never took Stan’s measure as a politician, and won’t now. What I do know is that he was a good man, and that I’ll miss him. Godspeed, Stan.

Monday, December 29, 2008

We've shopped 'til we dropped - then shopped some more

I’m not certain when it was that shopping became a question of patriotic duty, but I’m guessing it was when U.S. President George Bush made it an imperative in the days after 9/11.
“Get on board,” he urged a devastated American public struggling to come to grips with the bombing of the World Trade Centre.
“Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America's great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”
Fast-forward seven years and the bombs are more metaphorical, this time tearing apart the world’s financial markets instead of New York City’s twin towers. But shopping is still the “cure,” apparently, as evidenced by our own federal government’s recent fit of pique with the country’s big banks over whether they’re doing enough to provide Canadians with easy credit.
I get the theory of it - that everything depends on everything at times like these, and that economic stability hinges on us all just sticking to what we’ve always done and continuing to spend. But is that really a solution anymore now that we know where such habits get us?
I lost track of the endless times this Christmas season that the media featured stories speculating on whether all of us would/wouldn’t be shopping in our usual excessive way this season.
The shopping theme is always popular this time of year. But the level of coverage was truly extraordinary this season, given the natural tie-in with the global recession. Radio and on-line polls jumped in with the tough questions: Are you shopping yet? How much do you think you’ll spend? Is that more or less than usual?
I doubt the media intended their scrutiny to effectively come across as an exhortation to shop. But that’s what it ended up feeling like to me. Was I going to be letting down the national economy if I didn’t get out there and do more spending?
I’ve got nothing against shopping. I did my share this Christmas, albeit not always happily. (I like the idea of exchanging gifts with people you love, but find the current tradition has morphed into some kind of nutso mutant that burns through a ton of money and stresses everybody out.)
But shouldn’t we be reconsidering everything to do with the way we manage money right now in light of what’s going on with the world economy? Not to oversimplify a complex situation, but the lesson I’ll be taking away from this period in history is about what happens on a global level when we all get used to spending money we don’t have.
Bring the big concepts down to the individual level, and it’s not far off of a typical North American Christmas shopping experience.
I understand the potential for economic disaster were we to ever stop shopping. Our spending habits drive business and industry in Canada and around the globe, and employ legions of people whose jobs depend on our willingness to continue to shop, shop, shop.
In Canada, we keep almost as many people working through a single month of crazy Christmas spending as the country’s manufacturing industry provides in an entire year. We spend close to $30 billion annually just in December.
But do we want to? Can we afford to? Those are important questions to ask.
Every January I talk a good game about spending less on the next Christmas, but inevitably find myself jammed into the stores 11 months later spending more than I wanted to. Judging by the number of grim-faced shoppers on auto-pilot I passed by in the weeks leading up to Christmas, I’m not alone with this problem.
Those who long for a return to the true meaning of Christmas lament the shopping frenzy that surrounds the season. A pleasant tradition of sharing small gifts has grown into six weeks of frantic buying, little of which has anything to do with Jesus.
My complaints are more secular. I just think we’re losing touch with the fact that the bill always comes due, whether we’re talking about our Christmas spending or the global financial crisis.
Lenders, investors, traders, venture capitalists, regulators - they all have had a hand in the crisis that’s rocking world markets. But at the root of the sub-prime collapse that triggered much of the economic mayhem are individual consumers who were in over their heads. They shopped when they should have been saving.
A tip for surviving economic downturns: Learn to live within your means, whatever the season. The only thing mindless spending gets you is more of the same.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

It's good news week

Even a doomsayer like me has to let up once in a while, and the Christmas season generally feels like the time to do it. Maybe it’s all those songs about peace and goodwill.
At any rate, I’ve dug up some nuggets of good news to share with you this festive season.
I admit, my initial instinct was to add a “but” to every one of them, because it seems that every upside has a downside in these problematic times. But for the sake of a holly, jolly column, I’m going to try to keep my gloomy inner voice in check for a change and tell you about what’s working.

The B.C. government is awakening to the problems of homelessness. Four of the six news releases on the Ministry of Housing and Social Development Web site this week detail actions being taken to house or shelter people living on B.C. streets.
Better still, work is underway on 19 old hotels in the Vancouver area to turn them into better housing for the impoverished people who already live there, plus add new units for some of the thousands still living on Vancouver’s streets. Sure, it’s probably because of the Olympics, but who cares?

Four “StrongStart” preschool programs launched this week in B.C. The new programs, available to any B.C. school district that wants to give them a try, are designed to help children get off to a better start when they begin kindergarten.
All the studies point to the importance of those early years in determining a child’s future well-being, so it’s great to hear that we’re paying more attention to that vital period of development. Parents and children attend the free drop-ins together.

We’re trying to be more effective at preventing youth crime. We’ve been talking about this issue like we meant it for a very long time. But what’s different about the latest initiative in B.C. is that it’s evidence-based.
In other words, researchers have actually evaluated the new strategies that will be piloted in six communities and deemed that they really do work when it comes to keeping kids away from a life of crime. The first pilot targets Vancouver children ages 10 to 15 who tend to take their first steps into crime after long hours hanging out with other youth at the city’s SkyTrain stations.
Too often, we tend to take people’s word for it when they seek public funding for “prevention” programs. We don’t ask whether the methods are actually effective, or require those running the programs to produce meaningful evidence that show their approach is working. If we really want to prevent B.C. children from getting involved in crime, that has to change.

Fewer Canadian children are going to jail. Credit the five-year-old Youth Criminal Justice Act for that positive change. Studies have repeatedly shown that jailing young people sets them up for criminal involvement as adults, but it wasn’t until revamped young-offender laws were enacted in 2003 that Canada’s courts started changing their sentencing patterns.
The number of youth doing jail sentences has dropped by 36 per cent since the act was passed into law. The past year alone saw a five per cent drop.

Almost half of Canadians are leading a “very” environmentally active lifestyle. Some 45 per cent of us routinely adhere to at least four of six indicators around good environmental practise, and another 45 per cent manage two or three. We’re turning down our thermostats, using low-flow toilets and showerheads, switching to fluorescent bulbs, composting and recycling.
Unfortunately, we’ve got ways to go. Canada’s household greenhouse gas emissions are up 13 per cent since 1990, with motor-fuel use alone contributing to almost a third of that increase. Oops.

Speaking of gas, it’s cheaper. These are happy days for drivers, if not for the environment. Gas prices in October were almost 12 per cent lower than they were in September, and they’ve fallen even more since then. Granted, energy costs are still 14 per cent higher than they were a year ago, but hey, enjoy the “savings” while you can.
Overall, it’s costing you 10.5 per cent more to run your car now than a year ago. But at least the cost of buying a new one is down nine per cent.
B.C. leads the nation in the growth of small business. Economic diversity is what minimizes the ravages of a downturn, so let’s be grateful for the more than 385,000 small businesses that together account for a third of B.C.’s gross domestic product. Show them that you care by doing business with them.

Merry Christmas, folks. May all your news be good.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Voting a crap shoot at municipal elections

In just over a week, we’ll pick the mayors and councillors who will lead B.C. communities for the next three years.
It’s an incredibly important job. We “hire” municipal councils to tend to dozens of vital tasks in our communities - from dog-catching and parking tickets to policing, planning, roadwork and economic development. A single term of bad council can turn a community on its ear for years to come.
Councils also play an important role in representing our interests at the provincial and federal levels. Municipalities generate a scant eight per cent of the total tax base in the province, so we all want councils that are strategic and clued-in to ensure they’re effective at “managing up.”
You’d think that the hiring process for a big job like that would be done with the utmost care. You’d think we’d be really conscious of wanting to pick the right people to lead our communities.
But you’d be wrong. In truth, 70 per cent of us won’t even show up to vote in many B.C. communities, based on voter turnout from the 2005 municipal elections. Even those of us who do will often have no real sense of who we’re voting for.
Just 27 per cent of eligible voters went to the polls last time out in the City of Victoria. In Saanich, where the mayor was acclaimed in 2005, turnout was 19 per cent. Only Metchosin and North Saanich saw anything approaching a respectable voter turnout in our region, and even that was a minimal 50 per cent.
Turnouts in the 2005 municipal/regional elections throughout B.C. were 25 to 35 per cent in most communities. (Go to http://www.ubcmsurveys.com/election2005/turnout.asp for individual results).
Voter turnout on much of Vancouver Island was below 30 per cent. Tahsis and Alert Bay saw remarkable turnouts that topped 90 per cent, but those communities were notable exceptions in an otherwise dismal year.
As for whether those scant voters made the right picks in 2005, all we have is our councils’ accomplishments these past three years to help us come to a conclusion about that.
That’s never an easy thing to measure. We don’t ask our incumbent politicians for proof that they did a good job. Nor do we often have enough information to gauge whether the newcomers clamouring for our votes will make things better or worse. I suspect I’m not alone in heading into next Saturday’s election with much uncertainty as to who to vote for.
It’s up to each of us to get informed, of course. In Esquimalt, where I live, nothing is stopping me from contacting each of the candidates myself to see what I can ascertain, because at least I’ve managed to find all their e-mail addresses on the Township of Esquimalt Web site. But that’s hardly an efficient way to inform the most number of voters.
The Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce has a helpful “meet your candidate” feature on its Web site for the four core communities, at http://www.victoriachamber.ca/elections/
There’s a brief resume-style summary of each candidate, followed by their answers to five questions on topics including economic development, tax rates and top priorities. A sixth question asks about an issue specific to a particular community (sewage in Oak Bay, homelessness in Victoria, etc.).
But the Chamber can’t insist candidates take part, so the listings are incomplete. Only one Oak Bay candidate has bothered to post a response. Half of the City of Victoria’s eight mayoral candidates haven’t posted responses. And with only four municipalities included on the site, two-thirds of the region’s electorate are out in the cold at any rate.
The Times Colonist has begun community profiles, but can’t devote the space and resources required to feature each of the 100-plus candidates running for a seat in our region. As for all-candidates forums, most are unsatisfying affairs unable to give candidates more than a minute or two to state their case.
Small wonder, then, that local candidates have been inundated with questionnaires from people trying to figure out how they’ll vote. How else to determine who to pick?
The lack of meaningful engagement goes a long way to explaining why so many of us just give the whole process a pass. Yet to think we’re now electing our local governments based on the largely uninformed choices of a quarter of the eligible voters - well, that’s kind of scary.
There has to be a better way. But until we figure it out, it’s head-first into another crap shoot. I’ll see you at the polls Nov. 15, and we’ll just have to count on luck to take it from there.

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Silence is golden, and frighteningly rare

I look at birds differently these days than I used to, ever since getting a great pair of binoculars a couple years ago that opened my eyes to the incredible variety of birds out there.
But I quickly learned that if you really want to see birds, the trick is to stand still for a few minutes and listen. In the stillness, life goes back to normal in the spot you were just about to rush past, and you hear a whole lot of bird talk that you’d never have heard otherwise.
That there’s meaning and purpose in silence is hardly a new philosophy. But it took birds for me to find it, and to remind me of how much of the world we no longer hear simply because we’re drowning it out with our own noise. What will the future hold for this cranked-up, hyper-communicating world of ours if we forget that?
There are days at the bird marsh when the sounds of loud cell phone conversations are just about as common as those of the song sparrow. We’re living in a time when “staying in touch” has morphed from a sweet sentiment about human connection into a jangly way of life that smothers the silences under a din of ringing phones and buzzing Blackberries.
I made the mistake of taking my cell phone with me once on a bird walk - once and never again. I hadn’t expected it to ring, but it did, and I was mortified to be the one disrupting other people’s nature walks.
Choosing not to answer, I then wondered for the entire walk back who it was who had called, as if it made one whit of difference. The only thing that being available for constant communication does is ensure that no time is ever really your own.
I regularly see people interrupting their lunch dates - important ones, romantic ones, it makes no difference - to take a call. I see them digging wildly through their purses and pockets to answer the ceaseless calls of people who simply have to talk RIGHT NOW.
I overhear the most personal conversations everywhere I go, conducted at top volume by someone who I’m quite sure has no idea of how widely they’re disseminating the news of their breakup, medical problem or weight gain. I’ve been in the midst of what I thought was a genuinely engaged discussion with someone only to realize that in fact, they’re sneaking in text messages to someone else.
Until Jack Knox got his Blackberry (why, Jack, why??), I hadn’t realized that the cursed devices buzz every time an e-mail arrives, prodding you into thinking that yes, you’d better answer right now.
Sounds like a genuine nightmare to me. But researchers say they’re finding that wired-up Canadians have actually begun to “crave the idea of access to a world of information,” and to associate their ringing phones and Blackberries with feelings of importance. “Being plugged in validates your importance,” noted Solutions Research Group in a report last March.
The private consumer-research and consulting firm, which conducts surveys four times a year on the communication and technology habits of Canadians, noted rising levels of anxiety in its spring report when people were asked about being unable to use the Internet or their cell phones.
Almost 60 per cent of the 3,100 people SRG surveyed reported experiencing “disconnection anxiety” at the thought of being left out of the communications loop, even temporarily.
“It’s almost like you lose your sense of freedom because you can’t just call someone,” explained one respondent in the Fast Forward survey.
“It’s like you are cut off. You’re just a little person walking around. You might as well be in the 1800s, like you don’t have contact. We are so used to having that with us nowadays, it is like security.”
Just 10 years ago, less than a third of Canadian teens and adults had cell phones. Now, almost 70 per cent of us do - 19 million people. In just four short years, Blackberries and other “smart phones” have emerged from obscurity to rule the lives of more than two million Canadians.
That the din from all that communicating renders us deaf to the small pleasures of life that are audible only in the silences - well, that’s a given. But what else are we no longer able to hear over the din of our constant chatter? How is it possible to think deeply about anything amid all this noise?
The lesson of the birds: Take in the silences once in a while. You’ll be amazed at how much you can hear.

Sunday, October 12, 2008


1860s-era NYC tenement brings modern times to mind
Oct. 10, 2008


Children falling sick - even dying - from milk contaminated by unscrupulous suppliers. Families struggling in substandard, overcrowded housing.
Sound familiar? It could easily be a story ripped from today’s headlines. But in fact it was 1860s New York City, in the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side.
I heard the story last week on a visit to NYC. Tipped off by a Victoria acquaintance we ran into on the ferry to Ellis Island, we took her advice and visited the New York Tenement Museum, where I found myself in a small, dark apartment that in 1869 had been the home of an Irish immigrant family.
The Moores had four children, one of whom died that year at the tender age of four months from the “swill milk” commonly sold to impoverished families. As has just happened in modern-day China, the milk was being diluted to increase profit, in this case with water, chalk and ammonia.
Hard to escape a certain sense of déjà vu when you hear a story like that. It wasn’t the only one I heard that day with troubling parallels to modern times.
The museum constructs its program around a tenement built in 1863 on Orchard Street by an immigrant tailor from Germany. More than 7,000 people subsequently lived in the five-storey building over the next 70 years, until tougher health codes finally shut the place down.
The museum’s tours are built around the lives of the actual families who lived in the apartments, their stories painstakingly stitched together from census data and genealogical research.
Those were tough times. The Lower East Side was awash in poverty and people, and the city was struggling to develop health standards as a new understanding developed of how disease spread.
It’s interesting to compare the way things were handled then and now. Back then, the public health authorities dealt with the problems of inadequate housing by demanding improvements - in the case of the Moores’ building, a minimum of two indoor toilets per floor and running cold water to every flat.
I’m sure the landlords didn’t like it. But they lived with it, and held the rents at about 30 per cent of the typical family income. Today, the more likely action would be to condemn the building and order the tenants out, with no other place for them to live. It’s not exactly what you’d call progress.
Life was pretty miserable for the Moores and their neighbours, and I don’t mean to suggest that there haven’t been improvements since those bleak days.
But as awful as it was for poor people in the 1860s, things were in fact improving for those living in poverty at that time - fewer dead babies every year, better living conditions, new and better care for sick people. Can we make the same claim now?
The 20-year-old tenement museum was set up by the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a group of museums and historical sites with an interest in raising awareness of past injustices and struggles. After our tour, we shared popcorn and ice tea with our little group of fellow travellers at a session facilitated by museum staff - a “kitchen conversation” designed to get people reflecting on what they’d seen.
Our group included a couple from Oakland, Calif., and four British travellers from London and Birmingham. As talk turned to housing in our own home towns, everyone reported similar problems: an erosion of supported housing programs; more people on the streets; the emergence of what appeared to be a permanent underclass.
(“In Canada?” the woman from California asked us incredulously. “I thought you were the ones who were doing things better than us!”)
The building where the Moores lived was a grim place: 120 people sharing four outhouses and one water pump at the back of the building, families with three or more kids squeezed into 325 square feet of space.
We don’t tolerate tenement buildings like that anymore, it’s true. But we can hardly claim the moral high ground given that children are still dying by the dozen from swill milk, and tens of thousands of Canadians don’t even have running water and an indoor toilet, let alone 325 square feet to call their own.
The Moore family eventually moved to a nicer building. Their three children grew up, got jobs, bought houses, and lived better lives than their parents.
Life was bad back then, but it was getting better. A century and a half later, we can’t make the same claim.
Text of a speech I gave at the University of Victoria Oct. 7 as the Harvey Stevenson Southam lecturer:

Thank you so much for coming tonight, and I’d especially like to thank the Southam family, both for giving me the opportunity to speak this evening and to teach a journalism course this fall at the University of Victoria. Both are pleasures I never expected to have, and that I’m enjoying very much.

What I’ll be talking about this evening is this thing we call “media, ” and the role I think it needs to play in leading change in our communities. Seeing as some of what I’m going to be talking about will be about understanding the difference between being passionate versus being biased, I guess I’ll identify myself right off as being biased in terms of believing that change DOES need to come in our communities, on many front, but at the same time I work very hard to keep myself completely open-minded around the ways that we might go about achieving that change.

Of course, I want to use the sweeping label “media” carefully when talking about the shortcomings of the industry, because there are any number of exceptional journalists in Canada and around the world who are already leading change and doing exactly the things I’ll be talking about tonight. Nor would I want my criticisms to be misconstrued as focusing on solely about our local media, as there are some exceptional journalists right here in our town. But I still see plenty of room for improvement in this community and across the country in terms of local journalists participating in powerful, informed and relevant story-telling that helps bring about real change.

I think that’s what all of us in this business actually set out to do, and what we desperately need to get back to both for the good of our communities and of our profession.

I suppose that’s what I’m really talking about: The need for individual journalists to think about the work they’re doing, and the part they’re playing - or not playing - in making things better or worse in their community. Are they comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, as the late journalist Finlay Peter Dunne once said ought to be the goal for all of us? Or are they succumbing to what I’ve come to think of as ‘drive-by journalism’ - in, out, and gone in a flash to the next story, and the next, and the next? Are they bringing their own passion for issues into their writing?

It’s funny, whenever I bring that up to a journalist, they immediately assume that it would mean showing bias in their writing, and that’s just not allowed. They think that caring about an issue is the same thing as being biased about it - a journalism no-no from way back.

But the truth is, you can care about something - you can have real passion for it - without being biased. Bias means deliberately leaving out aspects of the story that you disagree with or fear will undermine your own position. Passion means writing about ALL the aspects of an issue - the good, the bad and the ugly - and caring enough to bring all of it to the reader with clarity, context, historic relevance and honesty.

I’ve been a journalist since 1982, and still consider myself one despite having more or less left the profession four years ago.

I can’t claim to be an expert on anything that I’m saying tonight, except in the sense of having seen it all and done it all for myself these past 26 years, both as a writer and manager in the media , and as an avid reader of the particular stream of information known as “news.”

The world is a very different place than it was when I first went into journalism, but you can say that about just about any industry these days. In truth, the basic job has by and large stayed the same: Go out and find the news and bring it back for your readers and viewers - making money for your owners in the process by creating a product that’s good enough to buy, and good enough for advertisers to want to be part of.

I’ve never had a problem with the idea that a good paper can also be a profitable one.

So it’s that part about being “good” that I’d like to focus on for now. Do we have “good” media in Canada right now? Are journalists producing good stories? And what IS a good story, anyway - one that sells the most newspapers? Gets the biggest play on the front page? Scandalizes the most people? Provides the most useful and relevant information to the people who most need it? Gets read and talked about by the most number of people? Solves the problem? Embarrasses the most politicians? Galvanizes the community?

All of the above on any given day, of course, and depending on the story. In a dream world, readers and viewers would take in their daily media knowing absolutely that they were getting the most important, useful and relevant news of the day,
and that it was being provided by journalists who they completely trusted to make the right decisions in terms of which news to select for them.

The individual journalist has a lot of power in making that decision. While there may be a few newsrooms out there where one of those tough-as-nails Hollywood style city editors are still barking out the story assignments, I can tell you that by and large it’s the individual journalist who will be selecting the stories that he or she will be working on, interviewing the people who they think will tell that story best, choosing the angle that the story will be told from, and digging up the relevant details and statistics that will help them tell the story better.

It’s far from a perfect science. Great stories go untold, and ridiculous ones get into the media all the time.

Easy stories are chosen over more complex ones, because they lend themselves nicely to two phone calls and who’s got the time for more than that, anyway? Stories that take a long time to tell are passed over in favour of ones that can be told right now and then forgotten. That’s the essence of drive-by journalism - important and multi-faceted community issues reduced to two sound bytes, one for and one against, destined to be forgotten by the next day as another day of drive-by stories stacks up on top of it.

I won’t tell you for a minute that all of this was “better in the old days” or anything like that - we have long been a profession enamoured of the drive-by, albeit with some wonderful exceptions from time to time.

But notable exceptions aside, the media as a rule have not been leaders of the public conversation at any given point in time, but more like the documenters of the status quo. When it was politically acceptable to refer to Chinese people as chinks and the “yellow peril” back at the turn of the last century, journalists were right in there calling them those names.

But there’s no reason for us to follow rather than lead. The great journalists - Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and people like Stephanie Nolen in more recent times - were always taking risks in their writing, and approaching subjects from then-controversial points of view.

I just reread an old Hunter Thompson piece from the 1960s that I’m using in my university class this term, one that he wrote about the Hell’s Angels back when no one had ever heard of the biker gang.

More than 40 years have passed since he wrote it, and yet it’s still every bit as relevant today for what it says about the way to write about people from the margins. Thompson nailed down all the myths and the rumours that were swirling around California in those days about the motorcycle gang. He snuck into a Hell’s Angels meeting, then worked his charm sufficiently when caught out that they actually invited him back to party with them. What came out of all of it was a story that laid to rest some of the hysterical statements being made about the Angels in the broader community.

At the same time, it revealed the dark nature of the bike gang’s style of revenge that was in fact much more frightening than any of the uninformed bogey-man type tales that had been swirling around in the mainstream press.

A different time, a different place, yes. Hunter Thompson was writing a piece for Esquire magazine, and was no doubt given much more leeway from his editors and time to craft his piece. He was no joe-average newspaper journalist caught up in the daily grind, with a deadline looming over him. And covering the Hell’s Angels is obviously a hell of an assignment - gosh, who COULDN’T get a great piece out of that?
OK, so a daily reporter isn’t going to churn out an Esquire-ready masterpiece most days.

But nothing stops a journalist from at least borrowing some of the strategies and techniques of the masters of engaged journalism. Nothing stops us from seeing - doing - FEELING a story, with all due respect to the obvious constraints of time and resources. And that’s ultimately where I think we need to change - as individual journalists -- - both for reasons of staying relevant in this Age of Information but also to be the powerful story tellers who can identify problems and lead change in our communities.

For an example, let’s take a look at a subject near and dear to my heart: Homelessness. My career in journalism has coincidentally exactly tracked the growth of homelessness in B.C.

So this issue has become a real obsession for me primarily because I’ve actually witnessed the series of mistakes we’ve made at the political and policy levels that have created the disaster on our streets. I’ve seen us manufacture homelessness in our communities.

I’ve also seen the media - in the broad sense of the word, because of course there were individual journalists who were doing what they could to cover the issue well - be completely unable to get underneath the very complex issues of homelessness, or to bring any real understanding to it. They cover it enough to be able to say that they’re paying attention to it over the course of any given year, but never enough to actually inform their readers or viewers how to go about doing something to address the problems showing up on their streets.

That’s because it’s simply too complex to be dealt with as headline news, or even as “Homelessness: The Six-Part Series.” It’s not a story that can be told easily, or quickly. It needs deep, meaningful reporting done day after day - by a committed, informed reporter who has the full support of a committed, informed editor and publisher.

But meanwhile, the numbers on our street just keep rising, and all we’re doing is continuing to tell that great big grey and frightening story as a black-and-white, right-and-wrong, your side/my side piece. We write about it when some horrific or particularly outrageous detail surfaces, or when the shopping carts or the drug addicts or the sleeping bags pile up particularly deep in some part of town, but it’s soon forgotten beneath a tide of whatever else is coming our way as news.

Is it biased for a journalist to care passionately about homelessness? Of course not. Who’s in FAVOUR of homelessness, after all?? Were the writer to deliberately ignore the impact of homelessness on, say, downtown residents, or to write about all 1,500 people living on our streets right now as if they were freeloaders who needed to get a job - well, THAT’S showing bias.

But to write deeply and well about the many issues and sides of homelessness - to care enough about the issue to engage over the long time, and to learn enough about it that you become an informed source for a baffled community - there’s nothing biased about that. That’s about picking an issue that’s obviously critically important to our community, and writing about it creatively, fairly and thoroughly until something is done about it.

Think about the other issues that could benefit from a similar approach. Child welfare. Poverty. The roots of crime. Our environment. Effective political representation. Quality education. Health issues and disease. Within each topic, there are obviously a variety of positions that need to be explored fairly if the coverage is to remain objective, but that’s not to say the issue can’t be passionately addressed - and in fact, MUST be to maintain a healthy, vibrant community. As a reader or viewer, I WANT the journalist writing about those subjects to care passionately about the issue. I want them to help me understand what I need to do to bring about an end to poverty - to reduce crime in our community - to bring about better child welfare policies - to build a better world for my children and grandchildren - to take care of my health.

That last issue in particular, health, is an excellent example of something that tends to be covered in the disjointed way that disempowers us as communities rather than empowers us. Think back on a typical year’s worth of health coverage in the mainstream media and you’ll see what I mean. Coffee is bad for you one day, good for you the next. Wine, the same. Vitamins are pointless placebos, and the next day they’re the shining light that will save us all from cancer.

I took a three-day course at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland four years ago that was expressly put together for journalists to try to counter the uninformed, superficial writing that passes for health coverage in most of our newspapers.

With the notable exception of the very skilled health writer Andre Picard, of the Globe and Mail, we simply don’t know enough as journalists about interpreting scientific studies to be writing about this stuff, and as a result we leave ourselves wide open to promoting blatantly false information as if it were scientific truth. Nor do we ask the big question - of health studies, of political polls, of any number of surveys that we put forward as “truth:” Who paid for this study? Even a quick glimpse below the surface reveals that a great deal of what we pass along to our readers as health-research findings is really much closer to propaganda dressed up like a study - one that has been funded by a special-interest group or pharmaceutical company in line to benefit from the publicity we give them.

How does a community know whether to trust the information we give them if we aren’t putting the necessary thought into deciding the accuracy and depth of that information? How do readers judge the worth of an issue - how much they need to worry about it, or act on it - if the story of the day ends up being just one more in a long line of formulaic pieces that never gets beyond telling readers one viewpoint on the issue and then the opposite view to negate it? Another “six of one, half dozen of another” story? You hear talk of the need to tell “both” sides of a story, but in fact a story usually has at least half a dozen sides, if not more. Are we journalists doing anybody any favours by simplifying virtually every story down to a he-said/she-said exchange that leaves readers with great, gaping holes in the information they need to make their own decisions about the importance of a particular issue?

Or if the type of stories we write essentially encourage people to pick sides on issues that are far too complex to be handled that way?

How do I, as a citizen, engage in a story about a problem in my community if the journalists themselves haven’t bothered to? Why should I even read it at all, if all it’s going to do is depress me and disempower me by not giving me a reason to hope for change - a way into the story, and at least a small glimmer of hope for a way out of the problem? How can citizens be making the smart decisions that are desperately needing to be made in this country of ours when they can’t depend on the information they’re getting from the media to help them do that?

Like I say, I’m no longer a journalist, so I’ve got no personal stake in whether the media takes to heart anything I have to say about all of this.

I like my morning paper, but if I had to, I could manage quite nicely without it. I’m just back from a week in New York City, where I found myself getting by quite well on a daily dose of one of those free, pre-packaged little tabs that are all the rage in newspaper giveaway boxes these days.

But the fact that I can even THINK I could get by without a daily paper is enough to send a chill through my own heart when I think about what that means to the future of journalism. And while I may be disenchanted with how it’s often practiced these days, I still continue to think it is as a powerful and necessary vehicle for telling the stories that matter in our communities. But I’ve seen our star as journalists plummet in my years in the business, and I suspect it’s because we have breached the public trust with our superficial and incomplete coverage of issues.

You know those surveys they do where they ask the public which kinds of people they trust most? Not so many years ago, journalists routinely scored among the top 10 in those surveys. Now, they’re barely above politicians at the very bottom of the list. What’s that telling us?

I see so much potential from a more engaged journalism style, and in a newsroom team that puts constant thought and effort into the stories that they tell. There are a number of reasons for that that go beyond me just feeling protectionist over my chosen career.

For one thing, I’m an activist, which I suspect is what can happen over time when you’ve been a journalist long enough to see how truly spectacular this old world is at screwing things up, and how desperately change is needed on so many fronts.
I’ve spent the last 26 years watching well-intentioned communities blunder into the same problems over and over again, to the point that I would really hesitate to apply the term “progress” to what I’ve seen unfold in the world so far.

In terms of homelessness alone, I’ve seen the City of Victoria go in less than 20 years from having a quiet community of maybe 50 homeless men with drinking problems to a sprawling, unmanageable mass of humanity 30 times that size, their problems now grown to encompass profound mental illness, all ages, genders and race, vast drug issues, and truly alarming public-health concerns. Then and now, we seem completely incapable of understanding how it happened or taking even the most basic steps to rectify the problems. And yet it’s all there in the stories of the past.

Search Canadian newspapers through the Infomart database for their stories about homelessness over the past two decades, and you can see the entire tragedy playing out before our very eyes.

But in the day by day coverage, the stories are inevitably simplified and conflict-oriented. People in favour of a needle exchange are pitted against those who aren’t. People who hate shopping carts on their downtown streets battle people who see them as a survival tool for a desperate population. People who don’t want a beggar sleeping in their doorway face off against beggars who simply have no other options. Every year, a new homeless count and the inevitable comparisons with the homeless count of the year before, and that’s the end of that for another year.

Problems on Cormorant Street become problems near the welfare office become problems in Centennial Square, and nobody connects the dots that the PROBLEM is that nothing ever happens to change any of it.

And it’s obviously not just homelessness that ends up getting that treatment. Everything happens in the moment, and the context that will help us see the patterns in all of it is rarely brought to bear. It’s a massive waste of time, energy, passion and money. Meanwhile, the problem, whether that’s frail seniors stuck in badly needed hospital beds or sick, desperate people using drugs in plain sight on the street, children being abused by their parents and then abused again by a troubled child-welfare system - is never acted upon beyond the name-calling and blame-laying that passes for community news most days.

Sure, we fill the white space with new words and photos every day, but that DOESN’T mean we’re serving up the most important stories. Nor are we necessarily telling those stories in ways that engage readers and viewers - who quite rightly will just pass traditional media by if we can’t give them information in a way that has meaning and relevance to their own lives. Nor are we taking on what I think is an unwritten yet vital aspect of being a journalist - to bring context and history to what we’re writing about, and do it in a way that makes for a compelling read. I teach writing every now and then and always like to remind my students that getting the words into print is only the first step - the REAL challenge is getting people to read those words.

Another reason for me wishing for a journalism renaissance is that I’m someone who loves newspapers. But I see before me a dying industry, cast into deep shadow by the Internet monolith and completely unprepared for a new reality. News of the day, analysis, points of view, classified ads, theatre listings - all of it is one Google search away nowadays, This should be a time of dramatic reinvention in the newspaper industry, but it’s obvious to me that barely any thought has gone into how the industry will stay relevant in people’s lives now that all the select information media once provided is available in abundance - and free - elsewhere. I’ve seen tremendous changes in readership in my own time in the profession, and the only trend has been down, down, down. Ten years ago when I was in newspaper management, some 67 per cent of adult Canadians had read a newspaper the day before; today, barely half have.

Will our industry be the metaphorical frog that stays in the water as the temperature slowly rises, never noticing that it’s reaching the boiling point until it’s too late?

And for all their flaws and challenges, I see mainstream media as an essential component of democracy and a well-informed public. Without community newspapers, how WILL our communities come together to understand and rally around common problems? Who will be the keeper of our community history? Who will remind us that yes, we’ve made these mistakes before, and that’s why we need to do things differently this time?

Yes, more information is available to any of us than ever before due to the Internet. I marvel at the immense amount of information from around the world that’s now at my fingertips through a single Google search.

And certainly blogging is one of the most democratic developments to come along in a long while, because now there’s suddenly a way for ANYONE to be a journalist, and to break free of the constraints of traditional media.

But while I love the World Wide Web for the many wonders it has opened up to me, one tremendous drawback is that it’s primarily a vehicle for self-selected information. Nobody presents you with the information - you have to go looking for it. Another real concern is that all those bloggers whose sites you’re reading may or may not be know anything about what they’re writing about, and you the reader either have to put time into cross-checking their facts or - more worryingly - presume that what you’re getting is truth when in fact it could be nothing but hot air, uninformed opinion and lies.

If you think back to a time when a community got its information mostly from a single source - the daily newspaper, the radio, the local television channel - people were participants in a common conversation. They all knew what was happening on that stretch of highway a couple miles away, or what pet project the mayor was pushing. They all knew when trouble was brewing in the bad side of town, and which police department was trying to do something about it. They had the ability to come together to solve common problems in their community, because they were all well aware of what those problems were.

Sure, they were still having to read too many of those overly simplified stories pitting Person A against Person B. That has always been a problem in the media.
But at least they knew there WERE a couple different ways to think about the issue, and had a slightly broader sense of there being more than one viewpoint to take into account when making up their own minds.

Fast-forward to 2008, and the tremendous changes brought about by the Internet, blogging, chat and instant messaging. People now do much of their reading on-line, and their sense of community is in many cases an on-line one. That’s not necessarily a problem if those people are aware of that and are taking steps to be sure to expose themselves to a broad array of informed opinions to make up for the narrowing of their world, but it’s potentially quite disastrous if they fall into the trap of getting their information from fewer and fewer sources - especially sources who share their same world view.

And with fewer people in the community tied into a single source of information, how DO communities come together to solve common problems? What communications vehicle tells them what those problems are, given that yesterday’s newspaper readers have dispersed into all kinds of alternate forms of communication? We no longer have an easy means to rally large numbers of citizens around a single cause, or to ensure that important information gets to them quickly. At the very time when there are more ways to talk to each other than ever before, we are losing the ability to talk to each other as a community.

The Internet has all the potential in the world to be the BEST place to seek out a variety of viewpoints and angles.

I can’t even imagine how I got by without the Internet in my early reporting days, and thank my lucky stars every day for the astounding array of fabulous information, studies, reports, contacts, analysis and deep thinkers it puts into my reach for use in my own writing.

But as I mentioned a moment ago, depending on search engines to take you to the information you need also makes it very easy for people to self-select for information that already fits with their own views. They go to the blog sites of people who think like they do. They join Facebook groups with people who share the same world view about the issue of the moment. They seek out stories and viewpoints that reinforce their view of why things are the way they are.

They seek information on the issues that they’re already interested in, and thus shut themselves away from the issues that they NEED to be thinking about if our communities are to survive these challenging times.

No longer do they find themselves drifting through page 3 of that day’s paper and accidentally discovering a viewpoint that they hadn’t considered. They’re not reading the letters page and coming across a fresh way of thinking of about an issue. One of the things I love best about great media writing - the New Yorker magazine is a wonderful example of this - is how terrific writing can draw you into reading about something that up to that point, you had no idea you were even interested in.

But in the age of electronic searches of your favourite pre-selected news sources, I suspect there’s far less accidental reading going on.

Now, unless you deliberately go looking for alternative views, everything you ‘find out’ will merely reinforce whatever it is that you already think you know.
So now our increasingly fragmented communities are made up of individuals seeking individual sources of information. They’re not getting the whole story, or even most of it. They’re not being challenged to think differently. They’re not being exposed to different ways of thinking, and instead are immersing themselves in a broad global community that thinks exactly like they do. They’re getting only the parts of the story that they choose to pay attention to. They’re forming their opinions based on the stories of a new breed of self-declared journalist - some of whom are absolutely great, but others who are little more than rambling, ranting proponents of rumour, stereotype and unfounded statements.

The Internet, a tool with the potential to widen your world to unbelievable proportions, suddenly becomes the vehicle that shrinks it.
Don’t get me wrong - it’s great being among a group of like-minded people - everybody waving their fists in the air in solidarity, agreeing with each other, patting each other on the back for thinking the right thoughts. But in terms of creating an atmosphere for change, it’s the wrong place to be. The more our communities splinter into small groups of people who all think the same way, the less we can come together to solve community problems.

The more we break apart into special interest groups, the more we shut out the issues and the people that need our attention. The more we find “community” on-line and among those who think just like us, the less we go looking for it right here in our real-live community, where our service clubs and our churches and our community organizations are dying for lack of participants as a result.

It’s an atmosphere that breeds narrow-mindedness and judgment - two things that are truly the enemy when you’re talking about cohesive and functioning communities. It prevents us from coming together by setting us apart in our individualness.
Obviously, these are enormous issues that go well beyond how the media choose to cover stories.

We are in the midst of great change globally in the way we interact with each other, and I don’t know where it’s going. But I do think that it’s in our interests to maintain a lively and compelling free press in the midst of all of it - one that works hard to keep itself relevant in changing times. I used to argue quite passionately that there would always be a place for newspapers in people’s lives no matter how much the Internet changed things, but I admit that I now see the industry walking straight into obsolescence due to its seeming inability to grasp that it must - simply must - start to do things very differently, both for the sake of its balance sheet and for the benefit of our communities, which NEED media coverage that is thoughtful, contextual, fully informed and absolutely engaged.

As I’ve said repeatedly, we do have some excellent journalists in Canada who are doing this kind of work right now. I know because I remain an avid reader of newspapers, and a believer in the important role they play in our communities. But that said, far too many of my morning reads leave me so infuriated that I regularly contemplate giving up the whole habit. Too often, I see disengaged journalists filling the white space between the ads, and disengaged editors who have long given up the important work of trying to tell the stories that their communities want and need to hear. I quit the media in 2004 because I couldn’t take the state of the industry, and I’ve seen very little since then that has given me any reason to doubt my decision.

In all my years as a journalist, I heard the same excuses for why this is so. “There’s just no time to do anything in-depth. Newsroom resources have been cut to the bone. Who has the time to devote to a big story when your editor is barking for you to hit deadline right now?”

There’s truth to all of that, of course, particularly the cutting of newsroom resources this past decade, which has included a drying-up of virtually all mid-career training courses that once at least gave a few journalists the regular opportunity to try to stay current and fresh.

But they’re excuses just the same. It’s harder to do a job well when you’re in a hurry, but it’s certainly not impossible. It takes a little more energy and drive to engage in a story enough that you bother to learn the history and context of what you’re writing about, but not much.

The same tool that may one day be the death of the traditional media - the Internet - is also the tool that gives every journalist instant and easy access to all the information of the world - information that can help them tell a far more meaningful story.

More recently, blaming the “corporate media” has come into vogue. I’ve never worked for a paper that wasn’t owned by a very large corporation, so I haven’t experienced the difference between an independent paper and a corporately owned one. Having worked for Thomson, Southam, Hollinger and CanWest at one time or the other, I CAN assure you that with a few notable exceptions, there’s not much to this paranoia around corporate interference in editorial product, and I for one don’t see corporate ownership as the main reason for the decline in readership.

But I do see a bland sameness settling over our country’s papers. I do see a lack of community focus and engagement, or even an understanding of the changing needs of the communities we’re writing for. It would be so much easier to blame that on evil corporate bosses, but I suspect it’s really because as journalists and editors in a time of economic decline in our industry, we have become a profession of largely white, largely middle-aged, middle-class, comfortably cynical people who don’t often look too far beyond the edges of our own lives when coming up with story ideas and approaches.

And while I wouldn’t want to be seen to bite the hand that is feeding me at this very moment, I do think universities also have to ask themselves what role they have played in all of this.

I see journalism as more of a craft, a trade, rather than a university degree, and one that has to be worked on with an eye to improvement for the rest of your career. But these days it’d be tough for a young person to land a media job without a degree, and masters’ in journalism aren’t uncommon in the newsrooms of the nations nowadays. So what ARE they learning at university about how to be an engaged journalist?

I asked a professor at Ryerson Polytechnique a few years back whether anybody was teaching a course in passion and curiosity, and he just laughed and shook his head. But why not? Obviously it’s important to learn the structure of a news story, and how to put together an effective sentence, and how to avoid being sued or acting unethically. It’s important to know how to do an interview.

But if we aren’t teaching the heart and soul of journalism to tomorrow’s journalists - if we’re not teaching them to engage and connect and to care about the people and the issues they’re writing about - then it’s all just more words on paper.
I hope that I don’t sound bitter, or like one of those people aging into a rosy memory of how things used to be so much better in the old days. In fact, they weren’t, but perhaps it didn’t matter so much when the daily paper had everyone’s ear no matter what. Now, it matters a great deal, both for the survival of an industry and a profession that I still love a lot, and for communities that are losing the glue that binds them together.

Thank you for this opportunity to sound off - and hopefully to stir the pot a bit as to what constitutes meaningful journalism in an age when we’re drowning in information. I’m told there will be plenty of time for questions tonight and I’m looking forward to that, because the engagement and connection needs to start right here, right now. Fire away, please, and thanks again for the chance to speak to all of you.