A Riddle: What Do Hitchhiking and Selling at the Market Have in Common?

On the surface, it would appear that hitchhiking across Canada and selling one's wares at a local farmer's market have relatively little, if anything, in common. But having lots of time to think about it today while spinning yarn at the market I came up with a number of points of commonality.

(1) There is a lot of time to think.  As I wait for a ride, sometimes in rather lonely spots along the road, I have hours to think. Being ready to sell at the market at 7:00 AM and not selling anything until 11:00 - gives me lot of time to think.

(2) There is a lot of preparation for both occupations. Before I start to hitchhike I have to make sure my signs are well laid out and visible from a distance. On the road I need to make sure that I am standing in safe spot and one that gives a driver the maximum amount of time to see me. As cars speed past me I must ensure that I am standing straight, that they can see my eyes, that I am smiling and that in general I look presentable. At the market, I spend not only a lot of time spinning and weaving, but I also have spent considerable time making sure that my display is attractive and inviting. I also have worked on my "speech" and how I look (and yes people do notice).

(3) Every time I see a car approaching I must view that vehicle as a potential ride. No matter how frustrated I may become when it (and many others) cruise past me, it is important that I wave or at the very least do not display that frustration. At the market, regardless of how many people approach the booth and then walk by without looking, or how many stop - ask questions, all the while blocking others from seeing what I am selling - I must see every person who approaches the booth as a potential customer. I must maintain a sense of calmness and satisfaction with my lot in life.

(4) No matter how long I have waited for a ride, no matter if I am wet or cold- the second I see a car slow down, stop and then sometimes even back up a bit - I get excited. And excited is too mild a word - I get higher than a bird at the thought of getting a ride. It doesn't matter if they are going ten minutes down the road or ten hours - all of the frustration dissipates within a millisecond. At the market the exact same thing happens. It gets depressing and boring when people either ignore one's stuff or decide not to buy something. Today it took four hours before I made my first sale. But the second the person said "I think I will take this one" - I was higher than a bird. While of course, I would prefer a ten hour ride or a person buying a $125.00 rug the length of the ride or the size of the purchase does not affect the sense of euphoria that I feel.

So either hitchhiking and selling my crafts have a lot more in common than I thought - or I just get excited really easily.

Writing - A strange Business

Some days I don't post to this blog - sometimes it is because I am busy, but more often than not, I don't write because there is nothing that I want to write about (given the fact that I have decided to take a few weeks off from bashing Mr. Harper, there are now slow news days). On other days I feel as if I have an overwhelming number of  choices to chose from. Sometimes the conversation I share with readers almost pops out of my brain with a minimum of work, while for other topics it is a bit of a struggle to get the words out in some sort of, at least for what passes for me, a coherent form. What amazes me about this process that seems to be evolving is how often the act of writing changes how or what I think about a specific topic.

My last post is a good example of how the process of thinking about what I wanted to write, changed how I felt.  Initially I was irritated at the parents of the young child who died. Why were they blaming the government? According to the media reports, when the Ministry of Education's investigators did get to the unlicensed day care facility there were a number of dogs and 29 children (CBC) - 19 children over the limit of allowable children at a unlicensed day care facility! How could the parents not know when they dropped their child off or picked her up that there were too many kids there? Should not they have been aware of both the legislation and the capacity of the building? Aren't parents obliged to do due diligence? How is it my fault (as a tax payer) that they messed up?

As well the whole issue of suing someone for $3.5 million for the death of your child felt absurd and in some bizarre, perhaps convoluted thought process, it felt as if the very act of suing negated the legitimacy of their grief.

But as I started to think about the parents and their grief, and to wonder how any parent would willing leave their child in a facility that seemed perhaps over crowded but generally to be all right - I realized that thousands of parents every day in Canada have to do the exact same thing as did this child's parents. All of these parents, because they do not perceive that there is a choice as to whether or not they both need to work, have to find a reasonable place for their child - a place that they can afford. They drop their children off early in the morning and pick them up, at least in the winter months, after it is dark. No matter how loving and competent they are as parents, they have just spent eight hours at work and perhaps a hour or two commuting. It is not surprising that they lack the energy or capacity to investigate their child's life every night. My thoughts evolved from blaming the parents to accepting that we all need to take some responsibility for the way children are now raised.

The act of writing, for me, starts off with an internal conversation. I argue with myself - test my hypothesis - always allowing the topic to evolve at its own pace. When I start to play with words and phrases, I frequently am never sure as to where it is going to end up. But I do know that thinking about how I feel and what I believe is a good thing.

Perhaps if more of us engaged our brains and thought things through before we regurgitated either the opinions of others or our own poorly developed musing, the world would be if nothing else more reasonable and less angry.

Suing the Wrong People

I can't imagine a worse nightmare for a parent than to have a child die. There is absolutely nothing that one can do to prepare for such a tragedy. I suspect that in spite of hundreds of people offering their condolences and whatever support they can - at the end of each day for the foreseeable future, there will be a hole in the parents' lives. A hole that cannot be filled. Parents who have lost a child through an accident or because someone did not do something - must also always carry an additional question in their hearts - what could they have/should they have done differently? It is understandable therefore when some parents express their crushing grief through angrily blaming someone else.

Lord knows in the case of Eva Ravikovich, a two year old who was injured and then died while under the care of an unlicensed day care facility somewhere north of Toronto (Globe and Mail), there are a lot of places to lay blame. It is alleged that the home did not follow critical Ministry of Education guidelines including there being too many children being cared for, perhaps improper  preparation and storing of food and insufficient supervision. The Ministry itself appears to at the very least, not to have followed through with an investigation after some of the complaints were made.

The family are suing the owners/operators and the Ministry for 3.5 million dollars.  I would guess that it is likely that the operators of the unlicensed day care should have done some things better - that they, like all business took some short cuts to, if not make money, to at least to break even. I am sure that there are a number of unlicensed day care facilities in all parts of the province who because of the high demand for day care - have one or two children over the allowable limit. Some operators may do it because they want to make more money, while perhaps some do it because the parents ask them to take just one more child in. As long as the province allows unlicensed day care facilities to operate with minimal supervision, then there will be those who bend the rules and those who really don't know what they are doing.

I have absolutely no doubt that the Ministry failed to respond quickly enough. I also have no doubt that if they had twice as many staff to respond to complaints they would catch at least the most flagrant violators. I further suspect that if there were some reasonable alternatives for parents and children, they would close more unlicensed day care facilities down. But we are not going to agree to more civil servants being hired and everyone can imagine the howls from suburbia and the downtown core if unlicensed day care facilities were closed down because of violations of the Act.

From a very tight focus, the operators and the Ministry must share part of the blame, but we as a larger society must also accept some of the culpability. Our culture, while it pays lip service to the idea that family is everything, does nothing to ensure that one parent can stay at home with their child during, at least, the early developmental years and for the family's quality of life to be maintained. We all quite frequently ramble on about the importance of children and how they are the future - but we are not prepared to ensure that that if parents need to work, that there is affordable and accessible high quality and licensed (inspected) day care. And finally we all seem to accept that the new normal for families is that both parents work. That they need to do so because of the high cost of housing, food, transportation and life in general.  We are told that for many, if not most couples, there is no choice.

There is no choice because we chose not make it. My heart goes out to Eva Ravikovich's family. But I if we truly wanted to insure that something like this would never happen again - we all need to take responsibility. Suing a private person and the Ministry won't change a damn thing.


The family should sue me and everyone else (including themselves) - we all let it happen.

Dalhousie - A Lesson in How to "Cure" Misogynistic Behaviour

Last year, just before Christmas, many Canadians were shocked, disappointed and offended that a number of male dentistry students from Dalhousie University in Halifax were being investigated for posting or participating on a Facebook page that clearly was disrespectful and offensive to their female classmates. It is always tempting to assume that males who are misogynists are men who are poorly educated, sheltered and perhaps even disempowered themselves.  We want to believe that such attitudes can be eradicated with education and exposure to alternative ways of relating to women. The fact the bright, educated men, most, if not all, of whom came from privileged backgrounds would display such behaviour was disheartening. Amongst everything else, one could not help to be surprised that young people, raised within an internet culture, could be so arrogant and so naive as to not to realize that what they were posting was visible to the public.

By after Christmas there were numerous suggestions as to what the university's administration should do. I like many other thought the response in terms of how they were going to deal with the students was slow, not harsh enough and certainly not transparent. While some did suggested that it was just a silly (if poorly judged) bit of fun, for others the only discussion point was whether or not the young men should be castrated before being expelled. I am delighted to be able to say that all of us who were concerned about the apparent low-key response of the university and its assumed ineffectiveness - were wrong.

Last week it was reported that the restorative justice process implemented by Dalhousie had been completed. Of the 38 people in the fourth year dental program, 29 students (14 women and 15 men) participated in this process. In both the news coverage on television (CBC) and in the print media (Globe and Mail) it is clear that the approximately 150 hours each of the male students spent in this process has had a powerful effect not only on those men but on the attitude of the administration. The impact of the 70 page report that was released last week will, if people read it, have long term, positive consequences for that university and for other universities that recognize that there is a problem. When one reads some of the comments from both the men and the women who participated in this process, it feels as if there has been significant personal learning; that both the men and the women were part of something that could provide a model for the future as to how to provide a meaningful consequence when men act badly.

This approach is diametrically opposite to that of Hydro One who threatened to fire an employee who  made, in public, abusive and obscene comments to a female reporter (see blog from May 14/2015). The university could have expelled those dental students. Within the various codes of conducts and policies of the university, they would have been well within their right  to do so. Many people including some human rights advocates would have cheered them for making what was perceived to be the hard decision. Probably no one of power or influence would have condemned them.  Twelve men would have lost their careers, but nothing else would have happened. The belief that harsh punishment is a sound deterrent to that behaviour would have been perpetuated. Punishing twelve people would have, if anything, driven misogynistic behaviour underground - making it even harder to eradicate.

 Dalhousie showed courage and leadership by creating/adapting a process that was harsh (150 hours is a lot of hours and I expect that some of those hours - especially when they were being confronted by their female peers and others in the community were more than painful), educational and life changing. With any luck the process has helped to created not twelve men who are embittered by a process that lost them their careers, but twelve men who accept and embrace the fact that they are responsible for creating an environment in their profession and in their world where acting badly or disrespectfully towards women is never, ever okay.