Good News about City Buses

I have been fortunate enough to ride on city buses in a number of Canadian cities. I grew up using buses and street cars in a small town outside of Montreal. I can remember how exciting it was as a child getting on the street car with my mother - feeling very grown up, or as a young adult learning to master the brand new subway system in Montreal.  More recently, as I have travelled back and forth between Sudbury, Ontario and Duncan, British Columbia, I have used city buses to either visit different places within those towns or cities, or as a means to get through some city as I hitchhiked across the country. Generally, I like city buses (and C trains/Sky trains/subways). They are all relatively affordable, once one masters how the system is organized - they are efficient and as few buses go in a straight line, one gets to see a fair amount of a city on the way to your destination.  On a good day I get to chat with the bus driver or some of the passengers.

I think I am a fairly experienced and well practiced bus rider. I have, to name a few, used the bus system in such places as Sault Ste. Marie, Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Regina, Calgary, Kelowna, Kamloops, Vancouver, Victoria and on Salt Spring Island. I remember going through Calgary just after the Stampede Parade ended and seeing the hundreds of people crowding on to the C train. It seems as if they were all bubbling with excitement - especially the little kids, from all imaginable ethnic groups, dressed up in their finest cowboy outfits. I can remember the bus driver in Winnipeg who was envious of my journey. He might just have left his bus on the side of the road and come with me if I had asked him to; or the bus driver from the Sault who liked to talk about the number of hitchhikers he had driven to the edge of town - never to know but always curious if they got rides. I have had a number of drivers call up their supervisors and ask someone which bus I needed to get on next if they were not sure. I have seen bus drivers maintain their composure in busy rush hour traffic as they get cut off again and again by inconsiderate drivers and I have seen bus drivers in almost every town let someone on the bus who did not quite have enough money to pay the fare. I like riding on buses.

Not all bus drivers are created equally. While the majority of them are polite and generally try to help me get to where I need to go, in some cities I had some difficulties in making it clear as to my needs. Calgary has been the worse. For a number of years I got bad advice from almost every driver. It was as if they could never understand why anyone would ever want to leave their fair city and therefore didn't want to help me to do so. The bus drivers in that city always seemed to be more grumpy than any others. But in the last four or five years that seems to have changed and not only are the bus drivers friendlier but they understand what I need and get me to the right spot.

The bus drivers in Sudbury, especially in the winter have a right to be grumpy sometimes. There are high snow banks that ensure that their stops are less than accessible, people with heavy coats have to fumble longer looking for the correct change or their passes - meaning that icy cold blows longer into the bus, the roads are icy and slushy and certainly in that city, many of the other drivers seem to ignore buses' right of way entirely. But this past month - without exception, all of the bus drivers were bright, friendly and welcoming. That was not always the case but something seems to have changed. So why are the bus drivers in Calgary and Sudbury now so nice?

I think it is because more and more people as they get off the bus, from the front or back door - shout out "thank you". Just a few years ago in Sudbury, it felt as if I was the only person who ever said thank you - now lots of people do it. I do not know why but it is wonderful. It is the same in Calgary - more people seem to be saying thank you - and saying it was some enthusiasm. In every city where I travel on the bus system and where the riders say "thank you" - the bus drivers are nice. I am not sure which happens first - do buses drivers become nicer and then people respond - or do people use their manners and the bus drivers respond? It does not matter - I think there is a connection.  

So as we start another year - be nice to those who serve us or help us. Say thank you to the store and bank clerks; wave a thank you to those car drivers who let us edge in ahead of them in some merge lane or stop so we can cross the street; say thank you to the crossing guards, those who hold doors open for us  or the receptionist at your doctor's office. Maybe - just maybe if we all say thank you and mean it - perhaps the upcoming year will be a kinder place and a safer place. It can't hurt.

Who Will Take My Garbage?

It is difficult to find anything wrong with the concept of recycling. It makes so much sense....you put all of your unwanted glass, metal, paper and plastic - stuff that use to go to the local landfill site - into a blue bin. Someone then comes and takes it away. Nothing could be simpler. The landfill site does not get filled up as quickly as it use to, you get to feel good about doing your bit to save the planet and the glass, metal, paper and plastic all gets used to make something else. What a perfect system! It no longer matters how much paper, plastic, metal or glass we use - it can be recycled. Right? 

Well, there is a bit of a glitch to that wonderful system. It turns out that much as 60% of our unwanted and used glass, metal, paper and plastic ends up in China for processing.  All of that garbage is what fills up those empty container ships steaming west across the Pacific Ocean. However, China in the summer of 2017 (Reuters, CNN, Independent , CBC),  announced that effective January 2018, it would no longer allow the importing of some of those materials. All of a sudden the perfect plan is not looking so perfect anymore.

I seem to have somehow missed the fact that a significant portion of my household waste ends up in China. I, like I suspect most people, just assumed that once my recyclables were picked up that I had done my job and that I didn't need to worry about it again. It never entered my mind that it was being shipped to China. Even if I had known where it all ended up, I would not have ever considered that China might not want it anymore. And I should have known.

I am a fairly active news reader. There are days when I may peruse the headlines of four or five online news sources.  If I missed this news, I am fairly certain that a large number of Canadians also missed it. I don't understand why this story has not been deemed to be important enough to discuss again and again until a solution is found. While I understand why we are attracted to the analysis of Mr. Trump's daily experiment in how to be an idiot, it would seem me that discussing what to do with our garbage is at least as important as what silliness the president has just tweeted. In terms of our children and grandchildren's lives it is far more important.

One has to ask why there is not more discussion as to what is going to happen to our used glass, metal, paper and plastic starting next week. The announcement appears to have taken people by surprise. In my quick scan of the news - I saw no mention of any country's alternative plan to deal with the waste. Bundled recycled material is already starting to fill up warehouses; municipalities that once shipped recyclable waste (and made money from it -Halifax use to ship 80% (CBC) of its recycled material) to China now have nowhere to put that material. The situation will only get worse and people will start to dispose of the material in our already over used land fill sites.

I suspect that too many people will find this discussion far too difficult and perhaps even uncomfortable. The solution to the problem is not to find some other country that needs money so badly that they will allow their land and water to be polluted with our garbage. The answer is not even to develop better and better ways of using recyclable material locally. The only reasonable answer as to what to do with our unused glass, metal, paper and plastic is to stop producing so much waste. As long as someone else will dispose of our garbage - we can use as much plastic or paper as we want - because we never have to deal with it afterwards. We, the developed countries, need to accept responsibility for our waste. We need to make a collective agreement to stop using so much plastic, paper etc. We need to pressure companies to stop enclosing items in large plastic packages, we need to ban the selling of water in "recyclable" bottles. We need to start to learn how to stop using plastic and to learn how to reuse the glass containers we now throw away.

It is time we started to deal with our own garbage - perhaps if we did - we would stop producing so much of it.

Who Owns Jerusalem

There was a time when I, raised on British boys books (specifically those of G. A. Henty), the stories of  Radisson and Groseillers as well as Walt Disney’s  Davy Crockett and the Christian driven moral rightness of the white race, believed in the absolute logic that there should be an Israel. The thought of a people, long separated from their homeland, almost exterminated by a cruel dictator (whom my father had gone to war to fight against) being finally given a land to call their own seemed only right. It never entered my young mind that there could be another side to the story, that there could be some people who were affected negatively by the creation of a new country. I remember in 1967  meeting a fellow camp counsellor ( at a summer camp for Jewish boys) who had just returned from Israel where he had fought in the 1967 Arab-Israel war. I was so envious - not because he had been in a war, but because he had been part of building a new country.

In the past 40 years, my view as to the justice of the very existence of Israel has changed significantly. I, perhaps sadly, seem to have lost my rose coloured glasses. I now understand that the western powers who allowed for and supported the development of Jewish homeland were far more concerned about controlling that part of the planet where there was more known oil in the ground than anywhere else, as well resolving their collective guilt for not stopping the near complete genocide of all Jewish people in Nazi occupied Europe. It seemed to me in the mid-sixties (being a church going person) that the Bible was an accurate history and that all of those glorious stories of the Jewish people escaping the bondage of Egypt and being guided to a promised land made absolute sense. It had to be true. I never considered the possibility that other people might have a different understanding of the past and that their God(s) might have promised them something different. It also, much to my shame, made sense to me that as the people who were already there were not using the land to its maximum advantage and that as the Israelis who were able (with large influxes of cash from the west) to do so - of course they should be able to lay claim to the land.

Clearly the political machinations of the “world powers” in the 20 or so years leading up to the Second World War, and the compex, convoluted dance of those players (and all of the new ones) that continued after that war have created in the MIddle East a Gordian Knot of epic proportions. A knot that seems unlikely to be undone in my lifetime unless a modern day equivalent of Alexander the Great comes along. An additional twist was just added to that knot that will ensure that only the sharpest of swords has a chance of resolving the problem.

President Trump announced a week or two ago that the USA would move their embassy from Tel Aviv  to Jerusalem. This single act formally declares that the USA recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. It implies that in spite of the fact that for many people, Jerusalem is a contested city - in part because it is sacred to all three of the mainstream religions that evolved in that area - Israel has first claim to it. It suggests that any possibility of a long term negotiated peace between Israel and its Arab neighbours (and displaced citizens) is now officially dissolved.

There was motion at the United Nations today - condemning Trump and the USA for making such a rash move. Trump, in his usual bombastic fashion had made it clear that countries that voted for that motion would no longer be seen as being friendly to the USA and would no longer be eligible for loans/grants etc. Canada has a long standing policy of working towards a two country solution in the Middle East; that is that there needs to be room for both the Israelis and the Palestinians. Declaring Jerusalem to be the capital of Isreal makes such a solution impossibe. Everyone knows that. There were only 21 other countries who chose not to vote. There may have been good reasons not to vote for this UN resolution - but it feels as if Trump acted like the bully he is, and we let him. While Canada may have something to lose in terms of free trade if the USA president decides he does not like us and he might even decide that his country will do nothing to help Canada if the North Koreans attack the North American continent but it seems to me that at some point we need to stand up a say what we think is right. At some point we need to stand up to the bully - that is what we tell our kids to do.

Two Sides of the Same Issue

It was reported last week that the CBC had cancelled a showing of the BBC documentary Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?. They appear to have done so because there has been a substantial amount of controversy over this film and its discussion of how we, as a society should respond to pre-puberty children who identify themselves as being transgender. To CBC’s credit, this morning they ran two separate opinion pieces -one arguing that CBC was wrong to pull the documentary and the other that it was right. One piece seems to support the view that children have lots of time to make such a decision and therefore should not be encouraged (or perhaps even allowed- I am not sure) to start any process, while the other seems to have evolved from the position that people, including children know their own bodies/minds the best and therefore we need to trust their feelings. One opinion piece argued that the data presented by the documentary was scientifically based and valid, the other argued the exact opposite. In both opinion pieces, part of the problem for me was that both authors wanted to argue the validity of the information presented in the film to a public that had not seen the film or the data. Not the best way to convince me of anything.

I just don’t know who is correct. I don’t know which side to believe. While I fully accept the reality that there are some people who feel as if (and therefore they have) been born into the wrong sex, I am not sure when people/children become aware enough of themselves and others that they can “know” with any degree of certainty. I do not know how one interviews/counsels a young child who has expressed some concern or the absolute conviction that this is true without subtly affecting or shaping their thoughts. I can’t imagine how parents make or help their children make these decisions.

The last thing I would want to do is to deny a person’s perception of themselves or in anyway, shape or form make them feel that those feeling are unnatural or an aberration of society or cultural norms. Any process that does that is quite simply wrong. On the other hand, to assume that there is only one way to look at and respond to the issue, and that any attempt to engage in a dialogue examining any other way is automatically discriminatory, is counter-productive. Worse than that it creates a polarity that make it difficult for people to find solutions.

People like me, and I suspect the vast majority of Canadians, have only a marginal interest in this topic. I accept that it is a reality; that for some people, being able to be who they feel they are is critical to their mental health and in fact their entire well-being. The only required response from me should be - what can I do to make this path easier for you? If someone needs a portion of my tax dollars to pay for supplements or surgery - you have got my vote; if you need to have our laws changed so that you are safe and that it is against the law for you to be discriminated against - where do I sign the petition? But if the general population are to be informed citizens, if we are to participate in this discussion - then someone needs to provide us with more information; information that is as unbiased as possible; information that is both nonjudgmental and non-lecturing in format.

Like so many of the medical and social advances of the last 20-30 years, the leaders, the innovators have charged ahead - leaving many of us far behind in our understanding of their new realities. Policies have been created and public opinion shaped (or at least we have been told what we should believe) without any public conversation. That is not the best way to build a consensus or a caring society.

Getting a Liver Transplant - is it a Right?

In Canada, before someone can be put on the list for a liver transplant, they must demonstrate that they have not used alcohol or illegal drugs for at least six months. The logic behind this policy is obvious. People who have destroyed their livers due to the over consumption of alcohol need to prove that they will not do the same thing again with their new liver. This rule is in part based on the reality that in 2016 while there were  420 (Canadian Institute for Health Information) individuals on the transplant list - there were only 381(ibid) transplants performed. In a 2015 broadcast on CBC, Dr Gary Levy who manages the liver transplant program at University Health Network in Toronto, reported that 100 people had died the previous year because there were not enough livers available.

Livers are clearly in short supply. They need to go to those whose needs are the highest and to those who will benefit the most. It is not that those who have abuse alcohol are less human or less deserving of medical intervention but rather as there is a limited supply - the system needs to manage it in a way that ensures the highest rates of long term success. It may not be fair - in a perfect world everyone would get the transplant when they needed it regardless of their previous experiences. But this is not a perfect world.

In the last few days there has been some media attention placed upon the case of Delilah Sanders who is in a hospital as a result of liver failure. Ms Saunders is the sister of Loretta Saunders, an Inuk woman going to university in Nova Scotia and who was gathering information on the number of murdered and missing indigenous women for her thesis before she was murdered in 2014. The argument being made on behalf of Ms. Delilah Saunders is that it is her right to have a transplant. I understand the frustration and the anxiety of those who are avocating on her behalf. It must feel so terribly wrong to know that there is little that can be done to save her life.

There is also however, a subtext that is of some concern. Throughout the CBC story, Ms. Saunders' Indigenous status and her active engagement in her community is mentioned a number of times or ways. While it is never directly stated, there is the implication that Ms. Saunders is either being treated differently because of her Indigenous status or she should be treated differently because of it. If the former is true (although there is no indication that that is the case) then it would be a clear violation of human rights. If the latter occurred then it would be a clear violation of rights for whom ever was taken off the list to make room for Ms. Saunders.

The fact that Amnesty International has joined the debate, stating that “"We are deeply concerned that the decision to deny Delilah access to a liver transplant is on the basis of a policy which is discriminatory and inconsistent with Canada's international human rights obligations,"(CBC)  will only add fuel to the debate but do nothing to correct the problem - there are not enough people donating their organs when they die. By engaging in such rhetoric, it potentially reinforces the concept that the discrimination is based on her Indigenous status. Canada has a long history of making bad decisions that were based on race and were discriminatory. This is not one of them.

If in fact, the argument is based on the fact that someone is being discriminated against because they are an alcoholic or have abused alcohol in the past - that in all likelihood is true. The system of allocating liver transplants is inherently unfair. It does not treat all people as equal. In recognition of this, next year (too late for Ms. Saunders) the agency that oversees Ontario transplant system “ will make patients with alcoholic liver disease eligible for a transplant — without first having to be sober for six months.”(National Post). While this is great news for some - it will just make the waiting list for a liver transplant longer and other people will die.

It is right and proper that friends and family raise issues in the media so that we can be made aware. But those who do so need to be careful that the language that they use and the issues that they raise are relevant to the issue.

I Told You So

I am sure I am not the only person who, at least secretly, likes being able to say "I told you so". It may not be particularly to tell someone how wrong they were and how right you were (or at least to brag about it), but it does, on occasion feel good. Today I can say to all of those folks on Vancouver Island who so naively believed that the political world had changed when earlier this year the NDP, with the support of the three Green Party members elected from the island became the provincial government - nothing has changed and I told you so! I wish it wasn’t so but it is.

Part of the Green Party’s campaign platform was the absolute cancellation of the Site C dam. While the NDP’s platform on the same issue was less clear, certainly on Vancouver Island (so far removed from the proposed dam site that Islanders’ opinion should have been almost irrelevant) it was understood that Site C was nothing but a Liberal boondoggled to be done away with a soon as possible. Yesterday, John Horgan as the Premier of the province, with the support of the Green Party leader Andrew Weaver announced that the Site C dam would go ahead as planned. In a world where politicians could be counted on to do what they said- the Green Party would have withdrawn their support for the government. In a world where politicians were held to their promises, this decision would be grounds for an immediate election.

While both leaders expressed their discomfort over their decision, they neither apologized to those who had elected them nor explained how they could go back on their words. John Horgan’s words which he perhaps meant as an apology to the First Nations ( “I am not the first person to stand before you and disappoint Indigenous People” (CBC)), strike me as blatant political self-justification and do nothing to encourage any sort of dialogue. If nothing else, both party leaders should apologize to the Liberals for suggesting that they (the Liberals) were rapists of the land who did not care about the future.

I do not know if the Site C dam is needed or if so, if it is in the right location. I cannot imagine the complexity of trying to determine the electrical needs of a growing province ten years from now. I suspect that that type of decision is well beyond the capacity of most British Columbians. It needed to be made without emotion - based purely on economic needs of all British Columbians. However, I think it is fair to assume that in the past six months, there has not been any significant new data added to equation. Therefore, both the NDP and the Green Party could have said what they said yesterday, six months ago. They perhaps would not have got elected, but at least they would have been honest. Right now it appear as if they said some things just to elected - just like all other political parties.

I take no pleasure in being marginally less politically naive than some of my peers. There is no joy in watching people becoming disengaged from politics because it feels as if everyone always lies. It is profoundly discouraging to watch one’s last hope of an environmentally aware political party become as self serving as all of the rest. It will be tempting for those who feel betrayed by the Green Party’s decision to support the building of the Site C dam to vote some other way the next election, or even worse to ignore their failure to keep their promises. The public need to develop comprehensive critical thinking skills so that during the lead-up to the next election we ask questions and demand answers that are not based on emotion but based on facts. Answers based what is good for the province as opposed to what fits a particular personal or political ideology.

Parties that attempt to give me the answer they think I want - will always betray me if for no other reason than they have no real opinions of their own.

Writing is Hard Work

A few weeks ago one or two friends were talking about reading this blog. I am always embarrassed when people tell me that they have read what I have written. While I am secretly delighted to know that people read my writing - I become uncomfortable when I am told that they have. While my proofreading skills are frequently somewhat questionable I, thanks to spell check, am reasonable sure that my spelling is all right; my grammar is slightly better than adequate; my thoughts are usually well informed and I have a reasonable vocabulary. But I am never sure that what I have to say is really worthy of anyone’s time.  

I write because I like the process of shaping the thoughts that are dancing around inside my head into some coherent message. I like the struggle to find the right words, the right phrase, that right descriptor that paints the picture inside my head. I write because of all of those thoughts and words and pictures will continue to bounce around inside my head until I get them out on paper. The fact that someone else might read those words is not always important to me. Like so much of what I do - writing is for me an immensely selfish act. I do it because it gives me pleasure. If however, it gives other people pleasure or challenges their thoughts, I am truly delighted and yes a bit embarrassed. 

For the past couple of years, I have taken a month or two away from my playing with wool to work on a book. I want to assemble some of the stories from my hitchhiking trips back and forth across this country. I think it might be interesting to at least a few people to read about those who have offered me rides and the things that we have seen and talked about together. Most of the stories are already written; they are either scattered throughout this blog or in the four 80-90 page journals written before the blog was started. It should have been easy to create a coherent narrative from the thousands of words I had already written.  Writing the book has been a lot harder than I thought it would be. 

I take a few pages from my writing, find a place where those thoughts and conversations will fit, write some connecting sentences and move onto the the next driver’s stories. The next day I read the same paragraphs over again, realize how poorly they are written and do it all over again. I rewrite a few paragraphs, massage the words into some sort of readable English and think that I am well satisfied. I come back to the same paragraphs and pages a few months later and as I re-read those words that seemed so brilliant, now shine with all of the light of a moonless night. So I edit and edit and edit again.

It seems to be an never ending process, one that perhaps I need some help with.  

There are times however, when I re-read a paragraph and I am pleased with myself. This is one of them: 

“The final reason to hitchhike is to see the country. I have been fortunate to live in four provinces, sleep in ten (plus one territory) and to see bits and pieces of Canada at various times of the year. I have travelled across the country, both in the summer and in the winter a number of times by train and by car. I have seen the Prairies in the depths of a drought with the carcass of a dead pronghorn deer laying on the shoulders of a dried-up slough in Alberta and seen the Fraser River at near full spring flood tearing its way to the Pacific Ocean. I have seen countless springs gushing from the sides of mountains and fields of wheat and barley ready to harvest. I have seen the magical fall colours on hills surrounding Ontario’s highway 11 and watched the cherry blossoms bloom in February on View Street in Victoria. I have watched the mighty tidal bore in Moncton, fished off the shores of Newfoundland and the Gaspe and camped on the beaches of Vancouver Island. I have crossed the Mackenzie River, that iconic Canadian river that flows all the way to the Arctic Ocean, I have used all three southern passes to get through the Rockies, I have hitchhiked in daylight at 11:00 PM and tried to hitchhike with a flashlight.  And every one of those hundreds of hours used to travel the 100,000 plus kilometres has been well spent.”  

If only every paragraph could come out like this……..

The Power of Allegations

I find myself somewhat conflicted when reading the multitude of reports of women who have told their stories of sexual abuse/manipulations suffered at the hands of celebrities (and near celebrities). To be clear - I have no confusion or ambiguousness in terms of the absolute inappropriateness of the abuse. It is always wrong when one person uses their size, their hierarchical position, their power or their status to manipulate or to force someone to do something that they do not want to do. There are no exemptions this rule. One might be able to argue that forty or more years ago the rules were less clearly articulated - but since the mid 1970s, one would have had to live in a cave a hundred feet below the surface, with no access to any media to be able to convincingly argue that  they did not know that forcing a person to be involved in any sexual activity was wrong. But I am conflicted by the harsh condemnation of the men who have been accused and in many cases, the life changing consequences of those allegations.

I realize that it is at times inconvenient to have to wait until people are tried and convicted before they have to face the consequences of their activities. I appreciate the fact, that for the victim it is so much more cathartic to be able to scream out J’accuse! and then have the world immediately respond in a punitive fashion. But that is not the way our world is supposed to work. I have no doubt that 99.9% (there are relatively few false allegations CBC, CBC) of those who report abuse have in fact experienced at the very least, highly inappropriate advances and touching but that fact in itself, is not sufficient to condemn all men who have been accused of being abusers.

The list of men who have been accused of abuse is perhaps surprisingly short considering how often one hears about the “casting couch”.  I have no doubt that an overwhelming number of them are quilty. What causes me some concern is how quickly those men have lost their professional positions. Employers have gone from an attitude of seeing how easily they can cover up/hide the “incident” to immediate dismissal with no appeal in what seems like a period of weeks. For example just over a year ago, the person who was to be elected president of the USA got elected in spite of a number of allegations of sexual touching and famous stars such as Bill Cosby appear to have be able to avoid most of the consequences of their alleged abuses. Now if two or more people alleged that something happens, the alleged perpetrator, if they are of high enough status or position, immediately lose their job and in many cases any likelihood of getting another job in the near future.

In the early 1950s, in the USA, there was the House Un-American Activities Committee chaired by Senator McCarthy. During that time some people were accused of being Communists or at least being sympathetic to that ideology and as a consequence they were blacklisted - made unemployable. That blacklist had no legal weight, the individuals were not found guilty by a court of law, but were held guilty by the guardians of public morals and political correctness. There seemed to be some sort of political hysteria that allowed people to comfortably accuse and find guilt - it was a time when it was impossible for the accused to explain or defend themselves.

The current spate of accusations do not seem to differentiate between degrees of sexual inappropriateness. While it is clearly completely wrong for a person to force themselves on someone either through physical strength or by manipulations based on power or status, I am not convinced that posing for a picture of pretending (but not) touching the breasts of a fully clothed, sleeping woman warrants the same sort of consequence. The former act should end in a criminal conviction and the serving of time, the latter act perhaps only warrants a strong slap on the wrist and the public humiliation of being shown for a fool.

The present public outrage (or people getting on a bandwagon for political reasons) is not a constructive way of dealing with the problem. By lumping together all perpetrators into the same pot, we are not distinguishing between those who are perpetual predators of vulnerable people from those who in a moment of stupidity did something that they should not have done. No amount of education or redress would change the former group of perpetrators, the latter group can (and in many cases have) changed their ways.

We, as a society, decided some time ago that public lynching, whether the individual is guilty or not - is not the way to achieve a just society. It feels as if, in our legitimate rage against those who sexually prey upon others, we are - via the social media - agreeing to and participating in a new form of public lynching.

Bah humbug! 2017 Version

I went food shopping yesterday (November 24). The store was decorated with Christmas stuff, there were lots of electronics for sale at the entrance ( in celebration of Black Friday), Christmas paper displays and Lord help us - there was Christmas music playing - loudly - over the P.A. system.

I understand that it is important (for the store owners) to remind us as often as possible that at this time of the year, we need to go into debt to buy presents for our loved ones (and ourselves). I understand that the current theory of marketing is if the customer is overwhelmed with advertisements, inducements and pleasant, if boring music that they will be seduced into buying stuff early and frequently. That the sooner we start to buy stuff, the more that we will buy. I understand that thousands if not millions of people's lives depend upon how much stuff we collectively buy. Unfortunately most of the people live in China or other off-shore countries. I understand that the owners of Supercentre, Wal-Mart and other major corporations assume that I am a complete idiot who can be and in fact needs to be manipulated into making any decision at all.

I can ignore, with some irritation the Christmas displays that partially block aisles, of the additional "seasonal" food items strategically placed to catch my eye thereby making it harder to find the items that are usually in that spot and the absurdity of having electronic toys and sound systems placed in the entrance of a food store - but I find it very difficult to ignore the music. It is loud, boring and just irritating. For those of us who chose to not celebrate this season in the usual fashion, for those of us who find this time of year particularly challenging or emotionally stressful, for those of us who feel isolated or depressed - the last thing we want to hear for the next month is bloody Christmas music all telling us that it is the most wonderful time of the year.

My personal bet is that those folks who want to celebrate Christmas - know that Christmas is a month away. The vast majority of those people know what they have to do - they do not need to be reminded. Those people who don't want to or can't celebrate the day - don't need to be reminded either.

Turn off the music- please!