No Hell in a Handbasket This Week or Ode to My Granddaughter

I went to a regional high school track and field meet yesterday. That, in itself, is not remarkable. Across much of Canada and I suspect the US, there are thousands of such events occurring during the months of April, May and June. I also suspect that what I observe at this one meet, occurred at virtually every other meet across Canada. Track and field competitions are different from the team sports plays at high school. It is, I think, easier and safer to compete as part of a team and lose than to compete as an individual where you are not only competing against other individuals, you are also competing against yourself. To compete on your own takes a level of courage that may not always be readily apparent.

There were a lot of teenagers. There may have been more teenagers at this event than I have seen in one spot for a long time. Some of the teenagers were obviously older, perhaps competing in the last track or field event of their lives. Equally as obvious were those younger students who were competing in their first competition. Some of the competitors were both gifted athletically and as well as being highly motivated. Some were less so.  In most of the events that I watched, there were clearly one or two athletes whose natural skill and I suspect hard work put them at the top of their field. There were some competitors who demonstrated both a poise and a skill level that suggested that they had received training and advice from coaches other than high school gym teachers. There were some who were obviously talented enough that they might go on to compete at a university level or perhaps even at a national or international level. But most of the student competing in this track and field day and in all of the others across Canada will not make their fame or fortune through athletics. And that makes their active participation all the more remarkable.

For every student who ran faster, jumped higher or threw further than anyone else, there were ten or twelve students who never came close. For every student who collected some sort of ribbon for placing, there were at least an equal number of students who went home with nothing. And all of them tried and they tried hard. No matter how far back they were in the race, no matter how clearly out classed they were, they did their best. That, at least in my mind, speaks to their character. I suspect it is far easier to work hard and to put yourself on public display when there is a good chance of you winning, than it is to do so when you know you can’t win.

The other remarkable thing about this event were the number of adults that were supervising the students. There were none. There were adults acting as judges or starters, there were a few coaches from every school cheering on their athletes, but the students were, for the most part, on their own.  They were not being “babysat”, their behaviours were not being monitored, they were not being controlled or organized in anyway. They got to their events, warmed-up and competed – all without being told what or when to do it. During their down time the students watched school mates compete, talked to other competitors and just hung around. Attractive young women wearing relatively skimpy running clothes walked by young men – with never, at least in my hearing any lewd comments. There was no language that could be called offensive, nor was there any no loud or boisterous behaviour. They acted as mature competent young adults who had the capacity to be organized, focused and just nice people.

In a world where supposedly wise people and other types of doddering old fools sitting on their rocking chairs pontificate about the impending world collapse caused by the incapacities of young people, let me just say: I see no signs of an imminent collapse. In fact I am quite comfortable trusting my future to such young people as I saw yesterday. I am in good hands. 

On Being a Smug Canadian

When it comes to taking in refugees, it is easy for Canadians to feel just a little bit better, a little bit more noble than other countries. After all we did take in 25,000 Syrian refugees in a few months. There is no doubt that we have the right to feel as if we did the right thing, (once we decided to do something after four years of doing basically nothing). While there have been numerous glitches in the system and quite clearly the bureaucracy was, at times, inadequate to the task, those that came are well on their way to being settled in their new homes. It may be three or four years before anyone can determine how successful the relocation was but I think we can take some satisfaction for a job at least well started.  It is easy for us to feel smug. It is easy for us to feel that we have done it better than other country.  But those who propagate such stories are being disingenuous. We have been reasonable successful because unlike the majority of developed countries, we have an almost absolute control over our borders. Canada has never faced the level of illegal immigrants that the US or Europe has dealt with for the past few decades.

The US, for example has been rightly criticized for its policies or lack thereof on illegal immigrants from Mexico, South and Central America. According to Pew Research there were 11.3 million illegal (or 3.5% of the total population) immigrants/refugees in the US. As they are illegal, those numbers could be much higher as illegal immigrants are for obvious reasons, notoriously difficult to count. The US has almost no control over who sneaks in. Their southern border is just too long. In spite of fences and armed patrols, people cross the border daily. The US authorities may, in many people’s minds, behave badly as it attempts to manage the influx of uninvited people. They may be treating those individuals as second class citizens, denying them and their children the right to education or health care; they may be creating a political environment that can only lead to violence, but US government is dealing with a problem that they did not, at least initially, create. A problem for which there is little political will on the part of tax payers to resolve.

The situation in Europe is even worse. The BBC estimates that in 2015 over a million refugees crossed over into Europe without permission. In 2016, according the UN, 189,000 people have already travelled by boat to land on the shores of Europe. It may be impossible to even estimate the number of people who have crossed over by land. Britain, theoretically protected by the English Channel from undocumented refugees (the political correct way of saying illegal immigrants), reports that there are thousands of such individuals.(The Telegraph) living in Britain. Some tax payers, even those who have a strong belief in social justice, are debating on how many people can developed countries accept before their infrastructure breaks down.

In spite of some searching on the internet, I could not find any reliable information suggesting that Canada had a significant number of undocumented immigrants. There are certainly a number of individuals who just stayed once their visas expired, there are some who snuck into the country from the US and I am sure there are a handful who arrived under false pretenses and have evaporated into the Canadian landscape. But there are very few illegal immigrants and they have never come across our borders in such huge numbers that our infrastructure was overwhelmed.

Canada has done well (not as well as Sweden) in terms of accepting refugees, specifically those from the Middle East. Canada could and should do a lot more. But the one thing Canada should not do is to pat our backs too loudly over the small number of invited and uninvited immigrant/refugees who come to our country. Our measly contributions pale in comparison to what other countries are experiencing.

Television and Politicians – an only semi-humorous comment

If there was ever a match made in hell, television and politicians would surely be it. I think one could easily hypothesize that many of our current political ills are a direct result of politicians have accessing to the public via television .

Before there was television, politicians had limited opportunity to communicate directly with the public. Yes there was radio, but the listening public had no way of knowing where the broadcast was coming from or what the politician was wearing. It did not matter. There was no attempt to sway the public by wearing V necked sweaters or walking around in perfectly tailored white shirts with the sleeves rolled up. There were no logs burning in the fireplace or perfectly decorated Christmas trees, no office desk with just enough papers on it to look like the person actually worked there, no pictures of the wife and kids to prove you were a family man - just a voice coming through a poor quality radio speaker. One could do other things while listening to the radio, one was not being compelled to watch the speaker. There was no daily, televised question period where politicians preened and performed for a bored and hungry-for-a-scandal public. There were no televised interviews with questions from learned correspondent that only reinforced the party’s platform.  If someone wanted to see a politician speak, one had to actually go out to a meeting to see and hear them.  If one wanted to learn what the politician said they stood for – you had to actual sit down and read. Before there was television, there were not generations of people trained by Sesame Street and other similar programs to get their information in 90 seconds burst.

There are some who argue that television (and all of the social media) has increased our access to politicians; that they are more accountable to the public; that they can get away with less because we are watching them so much more closely. Balderdash!!! While it is true that we have greater access than ever to the images that the politicians want us to see (can there be any doubt that the daily question period in the Canadian Parliament is a scripted play with poorly trained actors regurgitating lines used  hundred times before?), we do not have greater access to the politicians themselves. While it may appear that those politicians are more accountable and therefore more responsive to their public, they are not. As opposed to television making the politicians more accessible and more accountable, it has given them one more avenue to manipulate the oh so gullible public.

Donald Trump’s surprising (at least to the pundits) rise to the position of being the Republican Party’s candidate for the U.S. president may be the best example of a superb showman manipulating the airwaves to gain popularity. There are however, many other examples of how politicians shamelessly use our willingness to sit mindlessly front of a screen, on the presumed assumption that one can learn all one needs to learn through osmosis. As a matter of fact it is hard to think of examples of a politician on television when it was not staged to present them at maximum advantage.

Having said the above, I must confess that I am somewhat confused as to why political leaders go on late night television to be interviewed/mocked by the show’s host. An example of which is Trudeau’s interview with correspondent Hasan Minhaj as part of the Daily Show’s satirical look at the anti-Syrian immigration rhetoric of the American right. While I hope it was clear to most watchers that it was satirical and that the Daily Show is on record of being supportive towards immigration for Syrian refugees, one cannot ever be sure. What possible value does such an appearance have for a Canadian Prime Minister. It does nothing to enhance his or our image, it is difficult to believe that he did it to increase his popularity or that he thought by doing so he would change some American’s minds. He did well and passed on his standard message but why bother?

To Mr. Trudeau and all other politicians – less acting before the cameras and more work when the cameras and lights are turned off would go a long way to convincing me that you  actually care about the issues you profess to and are prepared to do something about them.