A New Year approaches and I can only celebrate my insignificance as a human being and even worse, a pedestrian, thanks to Montreal’s municipal government. Yes, Montreal was hit with a heavy snow storm as well as heavy rains that turned to ice. These are the blows that a sadistic or vengeful (depending on your point of view) Mother Nature sends our way during December. It makes us sad and weary but we expect it and soldier on.
What we do expect is that our roads and streets will be cleared as quickly as possibly and as much as possible. Unfortunately, this is an unreasonable expectation in some parts of Montreal, no, in most of the parts of Montreal that I saw in the last few days. The ice on the sidewalks was thick and uneven making slipping and sliding a certainty. While the streets were slushy, they were not icy. This forced pedestrians to compete with cars and forgive me for stating the obvious but cars definitely have an unfair advantage in the weight and speed departments.
This state of affairs would be bad enough but to rub salt in the lower class wounds, N.D.G’s sidewalks were impassable while upper class Westmount sidewalks were reasonably clear. When I went to get fresh bagels at the Fairmount Bagel Bakery, I found that the sidewalk on St. Urbain was not only clear but had small stones thrown down to make it safer.
I may not be in top condition but I was pretty scared of breaking a hip on those sidewalks and did a lot of hiding indoors during my stay in Montreal until cabin fever finally drove my loved ones and me downtown to see the Andy Warhol exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Outside the Museum, workers were cracking the ice with shovels and throwing salt down. If the city couldn’t get that together, it would have been nice if a few more building and home owners might have at least tried to get the square in front of their homes done as the Museum and our hosts did which made getting in and out of their home much less frightening. A little thought for others goes a long way.
If I was an elderly person who hadn’t stocked up on groceries and couldn’t have them delivered, I’d be pretty worried at this point because the sidewalks were barely fit for twenty year olds, let alone the elderly. I lived in Montreal and cannot remember seeing the sidewalks in such rotten condition for pedestrians.
Granted that cars need to have safe streets because car accidents can be more catastrophic than a few fallen pedestrians but this is no excuse for what Sherbrooke St. in N.D.G. looked like this week. I think that we deserved better and I hope that there are more complaints going out along with this one.
We live in a country where we can predict that weather like this will happen frequently and Montreal certainly needs to have a better strategy for dealing with snow and ice so that people can walk their streets without fear of breaking their necks.
Having said that, have a very happy and healthy New Year and above all, and I mean this, don’t break your neck.

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Dear Santa,
Well, another year has rolled around and I’ve got to admit it, Mr. Claus, this has been a rough one. Watching the world – my personal world and the great, big wide world – go to hell in a hand basket is rough. The rich may not be getting richer this year but the middle and poor classes are certainly going down the tubes faster than a toilet flushes and the Third World? They’re doing so miserably that they can’t even enjoy our slow demise as much as they should.
I teach teenagers and their latest kick is positive visualization. Yes, I have kids telling me that if they believe with all their heart that they’re going to get no longer than a 98%, that’s what they’ll get. The down side is that if they entertain the slightest amount of doubt, then that 98% goes down to a 96% or lower.

You have to love teenagers for their faith in magic. I know Santa that you are crazy about it but alas, I love those cynical types who have mean and nasty answers for the positive visualizers and I suppose that makes me a bad person too. As one of my colleagues pointed out, where does that leave poor people? Do they just lack faith? I have to say that disease, starvation and misery is punishment to the overkill-degree for someone who just can’t visualize a life without family dying of AIDS and lack of food and clean water.

Santa, it is beyond me to imagine a world where greed takes a backseat to compassion and where all the goodies get spread equitably. Maybe John Lennon had a better imagination than I have because I cannot imagine a world where people live for today and live in peace. Years of bad news have beaten that vision out of my head along with sugar plums.

By the way, I’ve never had a sugar plum in my life. The closest thing that I can imagine is a candy apple and I never was keen on those - too sticky for me. I suppose the elves like them but nowadays, kids have visions of iPhones dancing in their heads as I’m sure that you know very well. You should be so lucky as to get away with leaving kids sugar plums. They’d probably chuck them at you.

Mind you, if you were so kind as to drop off a grocery bag of sugar plums somewhere in Zimbabwe, you might see more gratitude. Given the cholera epidemic, you might want to send in an army of elves to do something about the well water and while you’re at it, there’s a few people that need some slapping up side the head rather than coal to let them know how truly naughty they are but I imagine that’s out of your power. You leave that to God, Fate or Karma.

So where am I going with all of this? Well, Santa, how about one year with very little drama? That’s what I would dearly love to have under my tree: a year where my family can figure out how to get through the various messes without intrigue and soliloquies. As for the rest of the world, what about some boring peace and prosperity? Maybe this big Recession/ Depression is a wake-up call for some but please remember that some of us are plenty awake already and don’t need the drama that those rich schmucks do. Excuse the Yiddish, Santa, but these self-centered guys really are schmucks and they have about as much spirit of Christmas as a Jew in a mosque.

Cut the poor some slack Santa by cutting the drama and we’ll all have a very good year.

Your friend,
Somebody’s Mother

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“It is at this time of year when there is cold instead of warmth, rain instead of snow and dark instead of light that I begin to look forward to the Christmas season. It’s misguided, I know, perhaps a little foolhardy but please remember that so far I’ve heard Christmas music at a mall only once so it hasn’t filled me with horror and dread…yet.”

I wrote those words about three weeks ago when I had a cold and laryngitis. Well, it’s déjà vu time again because I’ve got another cold, another case of laryngitis but I just spent 4 hours shopping on a frigid day after I did 14 hours of residence duty and through my coughing fits, I need Christmas and Hannukah and Kwaanza and all the associated festivities.

It is indeed at this dark time of year that I realize that it will be a losing battle to start thinking of Christmas decorations because we have time honoured traditions in our family that forbid the hint of a Christmas light till two weeks before Christmas.

Granted this is the first Christmas where my children are not living at home and I am starting to realize with some apprehension that there may come a time when they are living so far away that it may not be possible for them to come home for Christmas. My mother in New York used to say that Canada stole her baby. Though I tried to make it home for some part of the holiday season, it became more difficult once I had two kids and those white-knuckle drives through the Adirondack or Green Mountains became less and less appealing. It was much easier to spend the holidays with friends in Montreal whose families were also far away.

What was very difficult for my family was that I was never home for the American Thanksgiving holiday that always takes place at the end of November. Thanksgiving Day is huge in the United States, a two day holiday of feasting and togetherness. It just wasn’t possible. Many families are experiencing this and expectations are certainly changing.

Shopping habits are changing too. More and more people are avoiding the holiday rush at stores by shopping online. I find a great appeal to this. Not only can you skip the long lineups, you can avoid hearing bad versions of The Little Drummer Boy and Silent Night ad nauseum. I must admit that I am willing to risk identity theft (my credit card has all sorts of lovely insurance just in case and so does yours, I bet) just to sidestep the crowds, the lineups at the cash registers and the holiday Muzak.

So as I cough my way through the first two dark months of Eastern Standard Time (when the clock falls back, I fall ‘way back), as I cherish every ray of daylight that comes my way, I realize that the crowds, the carols and the garish decorations are not to be scoffed at. People need presents and a reason to celebrate in these dark times when we may not have enough money in our pockets very soon to do any celebrating at all. I know that my more religious friends will urge me to put the Christ back in Christmas but being Jewish, I get some leeway on that score.
We do need some Christmas cheer about now so I say to the stores and malls, "bring it on, bring it all on.” To my religious friends, I urge you to cut the heathens some slack. Together we will face The Little Drummer Boy and we will triumph.

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At the end of a hard day on the road, when you want to fall into bed and sleep, there is nothing worse than searching for a hotel room and finally finding one only to be caught by nasty surprises.

This happened to me last weekend and I suppose that it would have been funny except that I had experienced a weekend from hell. As many of my readers know, my mother passed away this summer and my father is in a nursing home. Last weekend, I went to their home to burn any documents that might have their social security numbers on them and to take whatever mementos and furniture that I wanted for my children and myself.

It was indeed a sad job made even more unbearable by the fact that there was no heat in the house and the weather had turned bitterly cold. Our hands were frozen and the task was made even longer by a meeting with the realtor who will probably be selling the house for us. She got cold so luckily the meeting was shorter than it might have been which allowed us to get back to work.

We finally finished throwing things away and burning papers and loaded up the van that we rented, heading north exhausted. I had picked up a coupon book that allows you to get discounts on hotels. Unfortunately, it was Saturday night and the coupons didn’t work for most of the hotels except for the Super 8. My husband was sceptical; he is a big believer that one should never stint on hotels. I thought that since it was a big chain, it couldn’t be all that bad. I was so wrong.

We got a pleasant enough greeting from the desk manager who even offered me a cup of tea. My husband picked up the key and we got back in the van and drove around the building to our room. We opened the door and that was when we were hit by something that we hoped and prayed that we had escaped, the chill.

The rooms each had their own heater and were not preheated. I turned on the heater with hope in my heart but when I put my hands up to it expecting hot hair, all I got was a lukewarm blast. I called up the cheerful desk manager who informed me that they never heat the rooms until it reaches -5 degrees. I was too cold and dispirited to ask if that was Fahrenheit or Celsius.

We jumped a blanket off the second double bed in the room and brushed our teeth with our coats on. The fan on the heater blasted all night long and by morning the room was warm enough. Then it came time for a hot shower but no such luck. My husband let the water run for a good ten minutes and finally managed to get a tepid shower. I was desperate for a shower so I gave it a try and was luckier. Somehow more hot water had made it to our bathroom and I got a hot-ish shower.

Disgusted, we decided not to try our luck with the complimentary breakfast so we left the Super 8 in White River Junction and didn’t stop till St. Johnsbury where we had breakfast at Anthony’s Diner. The food there is always good and it’s nice to eat well after such a cold ordeal. I love their home fries and if you’re ever there for lunch, try the coleslaw; it’s the best in Vermont.

I hate conceding a point to my husband but I admit - very publicly admit - that it would have been worth an extra fifty dollars to stay in a well heated room with hot water.
Take my word for it, if you need to stay in White River Junction when the weather is cold, steer clear of the Super 8. Learn from my experience. If I wanted to freeze, I would have slept in a tent.

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CBC: Bring Back On the Road Again

On January 27^th, CBC’s On the Road Again broadcast its last show. At the end of the the show, Wayne Rostad announced that the CBC had decided that this would be iOn the Road Again’s last year. Both my husband and I were stunned and did what we always do when our television says stuff that it shouldn’t – we yelled back.

Yes, On the Road Again has been on television for twenty years and it is vaguely possible that the show is out of date. Rostad’s songs approach a level of hokey-ness that many of us are incapable of handling. I may have a low threshold for corn but I think the sad thing about the cancellation of On the Road Again has more to do with where our society has gone as opposed to where the show has gone.

From seven to eight o’clock every night, there are back to back shows that do no more or less than advertise celebrities and the projects that they are coming out with. We are inundated with information about their movies, records, marriages, babies, drug abuse problems and of course their divorces. All of this stokes the industry that is larger than life and that keeps us happy when we are too tired from a long day at work to do more than absorb the latest about J-Lo, Britney and the queen of entertainment shows, Paris Hilton. More importantly, these shows keep us buying the records, movies and the products that the shows advertise.

On the Road Again has done something different. Every week for the last twenty years, Rostad visits ordinary people who do extraordinary things. This is pure unadulterated feel-good stuff that is not glamorous. Some of these folks are wacky in every sense of the word but most of them are inspiring as people with a passion for something and the will to carry it out.

There is the octogenarian who sends a weekly column from Old Crow, Yukon to a newspaper in Vancouver and the artist who uses every day articles to create beautiful sculptures. We’ve seen a Haida artist who tells the story of her people in the blankets that she creates and the calligrapher in Whitehorse who has an unabashed love of the written word. Week after week, we’ve been able to learn how varied this country is with its fascinating people who are every bit as interesting as the movie stars who rise with a bang and fall with a thud.

On the Road Again is the kind of television that our national network should be providing us with. It may not be as commercial as e-Talk and Entertainment Tonight or even Entertainment Tonight Canada. The point of having a national network is to provide people with the opportunity to see and appreciate what is going on in our country. It’s not all about celebrities or even celebrities visiting Canada; it’s about who we are, the people who don’t enjoy fame or notoriety.

It takes a special person to be able to put three meals on the table and then go on to build a replica of the leaning Tower of Pisa in one’s backyard or create an unofficial museum of vintage clothing in one’s home.

I am really sorry that I won’t be finding out about these people any more and I think that it is a real mistake that the CBC has cancelled a show that has been a lively tradition for the past twenty years.

Nobody made a big stink when The Friendly Giant was cancelled but other shows have been revived if a network receives enough complaints. If you feel the way I do, fire up your computer and go to http://www.cbc.ca/contact/index.jsp and send the CBC a message that you think cancelling On the Road Again is a bad idea. We like having a show that shows the wonderful eccentricities, creations and obsessions of Canadians from East to West. The CBC needs to hear that from the real people, the people who pay the taxes that keep the CBC going.

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What makes us Canadian? Snow…and lots of it.
It snowed last Monday. It snowed through the day and through the night. As I walked out of my workplace on Monday and had to clean off my car, I took a deep breath. This was a situation where the actual action was worse than the anticipation. The snow was heavy and there were mounds and mounds of it. Cleaning off my car was a real workout.
I drove through greasy streets at an overly cautious forty kilometres an hour and I was sure that more macho drivers were swearing at me. As I drove back to work an hour later in the dark, slipping and sliding and again crawling over the College Street bridge, I had to face a new and unexpected truth about myself. I was glad. I was excited that it had snowed.
It has finally occurred to me that winter without snow is no winter at all. I thought that I would love and be thrilled with such a winter. What has happened to me? Can I say that I have finally and irrevocably become Canadian?
A Globe and Mail article revealed the fact that most immigrants tend to identify themselves with their ethnic group first and their Canadian nationality second. We may have Chinese Canadians, African Canadians, Italian Canadians and Irish Canadians. Is it then possible to have American Canadians?
Quite frankly, I find myself referring to the people below the border as them and the people above the border as us. At first, this was something of a shock to me but as the years rolled by and as I realized that I had lived in Canada longer than I had ever lived in the United States, this seemed like a natural progression.
While my New York accent has toned down, it certainly has not faded away as my friends and work mates constantly remind me. Yet, the days when I spelled the word, colour as color are long gone. I have even given in to the our in the word, neighbour. I must admit that writing a cheque is problematic as I always want to write a check and I am always tempted to throw an extra c in somewhere.
This was all inevitable but when did I start to like snow? I could delude myself by arguing that walking my dogs in the woods on a hard-packed surface of snow is far easier than sinking in the mud or sliding on sheets of ice. Actually, that’s not a delusion; that’s true. I’m comfortable with the assertion that snow looks a lot prettier than brown fields although my lawn was eerily green up to a week ago.
No, I truly began to like snow when I discovered that I could cross country ski and love it. We live in a place where we have easy access to lovely trails and we can whoosh around to our hearts’ content. Compare that with life in my hometown of New York City where the snowiest silence you can hope for is finding a quiet corner of Central Park.
Now that the snow is here and the children are playing with it, I’m going to get out in too and I hope to enjoy it like any other true-blue Canadian. After all, it is the patriotic thing to do.

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A Hot and Fat Future?
I watched two documentaries over the Christmas holidays – Super Size Me and An Inconvenient Truth. Super Size Me tells what happens to a young and very healthy man when he eats nothing from but McDonald’s food for thirty days. He gains thirty pounds in one month and even begins to suffer liver damage.
An Inconvenient Truth is a documentary made by former Vice President Al Gore on the issue of global warming. His film shows that global warming is occurring at a greater rate than was previously predicted and that the vast majority of scientists agree that global warming is not a natural occurrence and is a real phenomenon that is the product of the human race’s activities on Earth. If this trend continues, global sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet with the loss of shelf ice in Greenland and Antarctica, flooding and destroying coastal areas world wide. There will be more heat waves, droughts and wildfires. By the year 2050, the Arctic Ocean could be ice free and over a million species could be driven to extinction. According to this scenario, in less than 50 years, we could either be very hot or underwater.
Then there’s the exposé of Super Size Me that reveals the increasing problem of obesity in the United States. This isn’t only an American problem. According to a recent study done by Ipsos Reid, obesity among Canadian children has tripled in the last twenty years and more than one third of children and teenagers in Canada are obese. One third to one half of all Canadian adults are overweight and this figure seems to be increasing steadily.
These two documentaries were definitely an antidote to my happy Christmas television watching. This is not a nice future that we’re looking at; we’re all going to be hot and fat. The question is what we do about it, you and me.
Looking out my window at the 200 odd light bulbs glaring away in all their Christmas glory does not make me a real friend of the Earth and my house seemed mildly festive in contrast to some of the others that I’ve seen. I don’t even want to think about the quantity of shortbread cookies, fruit cake and trifle that I’ve consumed over the past two weeks.
Guilt is one of my addictions. Perhaps you don’t suffer from it the way I do but if you do, guilt without action is a waste of emotional energy. You might as well light up every room in the house and eat twenty pieces of bacon with a big smile on your face.
Finding ways to change makes more sense. There are little things that we can do without it hurting too much such as recycling and reusing when possible. Walking more and driving less is a hard goal to achieve when you live in a rural area but planning your trips to the store so that you drive less wouldn’t cause too much pain and it would save money on gas. Eating nutritious home cooked meals goes a long way in keeping your diet more sensible.
The most important thing is to let our governments know that we do care about global warming and the health of our children. If we are expected to behave like responsible citizens of the planet, industry should be expected to do so as well. We need more environment-friendly cars. According to Gore, Asian vehicles are ahead of North American ones when it comes to fuel efficiency. Why are we behind them?
We need to start spending money to save our future and our governments have to stop thinking of global warming as some kind of left-wing plot. Partisanship has to stand aside because global warming is real. In spite of what some media pundits claim, scientists are convinced that it’s real and hiding the truth will not help big business when people are too busy trying to stay alive to buy their products. Otherwise, we’ll be one hot, fat and finally extinct species and that, my friends, is really bad for business.

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Ahhh, the holiday season.
It just never fails
to excite me.

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Are Milestones really Milestones?
The shadow of death certainly hung over the Christmas holidays. Both James Brown, the Godfather of Soul and former president, Gerald Ford died on Christmas day. Then on the Saturday following Christmas, Saddam Hussein was executed.
For baby boomers, this feels like the end of an era. Soul music was an integral part of my adolescence. Songs like I Feel Good and Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud were part of a decade that went from civil rights to women’s’ rights. James Brown was a big part of the background music of my generation
As I moved into my twenties, the Watergate scandal took over the news and I remember sitting with my parents and watching Richard Nixon resign. My whole family was shocked to see a president resign in such infamy to be replaced by Vice President Ford. It was unthinkable.
Now over thirty years later, Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror has ended in the midst of terror and chaos. As a follower of the blog, Baghdad Burning (which has been published as two books of the same name), I’ve been given a new perspective of how unimportant this death is to the person on the street. Iraqis deal with death everyday. Riverbend (the pseudonym for the author of the blog) says that nowadays Iraqi families feel lucky when the corpse of a loved one is identifiable. In her entry of December twenty-ninth, she writes about how differently she views death, particularly those of American soldiers.
When she first started writing in 2003, she agonised over the death of each soldier. She sympathised with them because she felt that most of them didn’t want to be in Iraq and were probably unsure why they were there at all. Now she speaks of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have been killed by militia, secret police and American soldiers. She wonders why American deaths are more important than those of Iraqi citizens. Is it because there are fewer of them, she asks.
It is equally significant to wonder about the deaths of celebrities and why they have an impact on our lives. Obviously, I never knew James Brown, President Ford or Saddam Hussein. I just don’t move in those kinds of circles. So I wonder why I’m supposed to lament the deaths of the first two and celebrate the death of the latter as some sort of liberating event. Maybe it’s because the media tells me to or because the world is a far smaller place than it used to be so that we feel as if we really know people that we have never met. Maybe these deaths are more of a media event than a real milestone.
January 1, New Years’ Day, is also supposed be a milestone – a new year, an opportunity for change. The fact is that people are still dying in Iraq and will continue to do so throughout 2007. People are dying in Darfur and probably will continue to do so throughout 2007. The AIDS pandemic in Africa will also be the same story. The changing of a single digit in the annals of time never seems to change much. For all the furor of the new millennium, mankind has continued slogging through the same maze and has fallen into the same pits. Both the Western and Eastern continents will be paying the price for September 11, 2001 for a long, long time. That was the devastating milestone of my generation. In fact, if we look back on the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the powder keg that kicked off World War I, that fracas cost the lives of millions for most of the twentieth century, almost one hundred years of wars and conflicts that have been the seeds of the conflicts of this century.
A milestone that I like to look at is the changing of the guard in South Africa. Though by no means a bloodless revolution, it ended apartheid in a far more peaceful way than anyone could have imagined. Many people of my generation remember when Nelson Mandela was released from prison as a moment of hope. It is that kind of moment that I am praying will be forthcoming in 2007. I look forward to a moment where North America and the Islamists of the Middle East as well as the Sudanese government see some form of compromise in ending the slaughter presently taking place in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Darfur. That would be some milestone! Happy New Year, readers.

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Last month, I had the privilege to hear Stephen Lewis speak at the Quebec Provincial Teachers Association Convention in Montreal. He was a very engaging speaker with many heartbreaking stories to tell yet there is one story that I came away with that continues to haunt me:

Lewis spoke about the horrible massacre that took place in the Ivory Coast where thousands of children were attacked and had arms and legs cut off. The Canadian Foreign Minster, Lloyd Axeworthy, was visiting a hospital and went from bed to bed talking to the patients. He sat down next to one little boy and asked him, “What do you want? What can we do for you?” The little boy answered, “I want to go to school.” That was the major theme of Lewis’ talk: the vast number of children who want to go to school right across the African continent and the vast number of children who cannot go to school because of school fees.

Last summer, the Manchester Guardian published a statement about school fees in Africa by the Minister of Education of Ghana, Papa Owusu Ankomah, “…an estimated 77 out of 94 poor countries, mostly in Africa, still charge some type of fee for basic education. Fees consume nearly a quarter of a poor family's income in sub-Saharan Africa and pay not only for tuition but also indirect costs such as parent-teacher association contributions, textbooks, compulsory uniforms and other expenses.”

Ankomah spoke of the amazing results that can happen when school fees are lifted. When Ghana abolished its school fees in 2004, enrollment went from 4.2 million to 5.4 million. These kinds of results have been repeated in other countries:

“In Uganda, primary school enrolment grew from 2.5 million in 1997 to 6.5 million in 2000; in Kenya in 2003, it jumped from 5.9 million to 7.2 million; and in Tanzania, enrolment more than doubled from 1.4 million to 3 million. Our collective experiences are living proof that abolishing school fees may be the single most important policy measure to dramatically transform school enrollment.”

Education does more for children than teach them to read. In his speech, Lewis emphasized that going to school releases children from child labour and it gives them the chance to play with other children so that they can have a normal childhood. More and more schools provide AIDS prevention education so that these children will have the information that they need to avoid becoming another statistic in the spiraling number of Africans contracting HIV.

Presently, the Stephen Lewis Foundation has a Grandmother-to-Grandmother initiative that allows Canadian grandmothers to raise money and support grassroots organizations that help African grandmothers who are the only ones left to raise their grandchildren as AIDS has killed their children.

I wonder if a school-to-school initiative might be another way to raise money for school fees for children in those countries who still have such fees. One Canadian school could adopt an African school and fundraise to assist children in overcoming this barrier. Teachers could adopt teachers. There could be a mutual advantage in this as children could share letters and artwork so that they could have a better understanding of a culture so different from their own and this interchange could take place between teachers too.

Meanwhile, we could advocate for the abolishing of school fees in favour of better means of financing. A press release from UNICEF states "We live in a world where children whose families cannot pay for tuition, uniforms, desks, pencils, books and building repairs are shut out of classrooms. And yet we also live in a world that ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child a decade ago, a world that recognized free and compulsory education as the right of every child. Governments have both a legal and a moral responsibility to fulfill that obligation."

We may not have a cure for AIDS but we can help children to go school. This is something that governments and people all over the world can implement if only the will is there.

This Christmas, it would be nice to think beyond our own children and grandchildren who are iffy about this school-thing that is a basic part of their lives. Giving the gift of education to millions of children across Africa who are hungry for education and who are hungry for a real childhood could be the greatest gift that we Canadians could give. Merry Christmas, readers and a very Happy New Year!

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"But Names Will Never Hurt Me"

I'm just back from the hospital and I have to write my column and I have to get over being mad at the world. I have been witness in the past two weeks to some very aggressive cyberbullying and verbal graffitti that I have seen hurt people tremendously.

Who the hell wrote that stupid rhyme about sticks and stones? Words hurt. They hurt like hell. Words have tremendous power. They start revolutions, they act like a conduit for hate and they can spread hate as wide as a continent.

For a variety of reasons, I cannot write about what I have seen though I should be able to write about what I have seen. Nothing is better than exposing hatred, racism and sheer stupidity to the light of day so that it can be seen for the rotting pile of excrement that it is.

My silence has to do with protecting people who are the victims of these nasty and cowardly acts. They shouldn't be made to suffer any more than they have.

I hate when people hide behind the Internet and masquerade who they are as they rub their hands in glee and go after others. It is beyond cowardly. Yet this is the negative side of communications technology: people who haven't the guts to look others in the eye and express the crap in their brains get to communicate that crap far and wide hurting others.

You just have to hope for the power of Instant Karma.

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Staying Sane
The past week has been a strange time of hellos and goodbyes for me, all of them negative. I suppose that it is true that the older you get, the less comfortable you are with change and that it is also true that the more things change the more they stay the same.
The shooting at Dawson College was a wake up call that yes, these things do happen here. I remember the shock that I felt when fourteen women were gunned down at the Ecole Polytechnique in 1989 and then three years later at the shootings at Concordia where four members of the Engineering faculty were killed.
What is so shocking is how hatred can poison a life to such an extent that the human mind is cut off from the evil of ending life. For Valery Fabrikant of Concordia, professional grievances outweighed the rights of his colleagues to live. Marc Lepine’s hatred of women drove him to kill Engineering students because they were “all feminists”.
Now, we have Kimveer Gill from Laval whose love of guns and hatred of his own life drove him to fulfill his wish to go out in a blaze of glory. He may have gotten his wish but as someone recently said to me – and I will be forced to censor the colourful language – it’s tragic that an eighteen year old girl had to die and that so many people had to be maimed because one young man couldn’t keep his life together.
Then in the midst of all this madness, there was my own little tragedy; I almost feel ridiculous writing about it on the same page as this massacre. My cat, Willa, who has been a constant companion for the last ten years, disappeared. We checked with the SPA and dropped her photo off. We walked through the woods near our home calling her name and one week later, she’s still gone.
I don’t know if she was hit by a car or if she ate poison or if someone simply liked the look of her and took her home far away. We took her home from the SPA about ten years ago and she was a faithful friend to me whether she was jumping in my lap when I watched TV or lying by my head all night purring too loudly.
Yet while I have castigated myself for mourning the loss of my cat while there are parents out there mourning the loss of a child, I feel that that this is the nature of our struggle to make our lives liveable. To me, insanity may be either a chemical or learned inability to see reality as it is. We need to be able to perceive the positive and the negative aspects of our environment clearly.
Through the years, it has become plain to me that there are small things in our lives that make our short time on this Earth beautiful, even if it’s only for a few moments every day. It may be a cat or a dog or a friend or even the person from whom you buy your morning coffee every day. They are all entities that touch us in great and small ways that make it a joy to be alive. They are what keep us sane.
I will miss Willa very much because her quiet way of showing affection to me was a comfort when the bigger issues of this world upset me and when the trials and tribulations of daily life wore me down. None of us like to say goodbye and no one likes to see a good thing end.
I would love to convince myself that she just may come back in another week. Even more, I would like to believe that tragedy happens elsewhere to other people but that would be insane. It happens everywhere and all we can hope for is that we can be that reason for living for someone else at some point in time and have friends beside us when tragedy strikes

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I went to see Billy Bragg this week and he was just wonderful. He also did several amusing acts of crowd control. I suppose that after years of being heckled, he knows how to deal with drunks and idiots.

I was disappointed that he didn't sing Levi Stubbs Tears as it was the song that introduced me to him. I love the first line:

"With the money from her accident, she bought herself a mobile home"

It just sucks you right in. It's one of the best songs about domestic violence around. I think he's playing in Toronto tonight. Enjoy, Torontonians.

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Newsflash: An Iranian newspaper, Hamshahri, has received over 700 entries for its contest to find the best Holocaust-related cartoon. One entry supports Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s view that the Holocaust was a myth. It depicts a circle of nine Jewish men entering and leaving a gas chamber that shows a counter reading "5,999,999," implying that Jews have inflated the number of Holocaust victims. Another cartoon shows Jews lining up and entering a gas pipeline.
Yes, there’s certainly nothing like laughing to bring people together and what better way to unite the world than running a contest like this every year. Maybe next year, Hamshahri can run a contest calling for cartoons on the killing fields of Cambodia. The year after that, there’s always Rwanda and with any luck, Darfur will be good for a few more laughs.
History is a gold mine of slaughter and human misery. Just ask the aboriginal people of North and South America. Their massacre over hundreds of years should supply the entire world with lots of laughs and lots of fodder for hysterically funny cartoons. Monty Python had an enormous amount of fun with the Spanish Inquisition (“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”) Nazis were absolutely adorable on Hogan’s Heroes. Blood, guts and gore are a lot of fun.
Yes, folks, you are probably wondering if I’ve lost my mind. Join the club. I am most definitely wondering if I have lost my mind when I see this headline: Iranian Paper Holds Holocaust Contest. I surely must be hallucinating…yet sadly, I am not.
Many people agree that the cartoons that made fun of Islam that were published in a Danish newspaper were objectionable and ill-timed. To make fun of someone’s deeply held religious beliefs shows a high degree of xenophobia and an even higher degree of poor judgement. In plain English, it was stupid, really stupid. I saw them, thought they were poorly drawn and they reminded me of those horrible World War II cartoons that made caricatures of the Japanese people, showing them to be insects.
In order to have an enemies, you must make them less than human. People have been calling each other dogs, pigs, rats, etc. for years. Frankly, these members of the animal kingdom command greater respect than some of the human butchers who have pranced across history, slaughtering millions, only to die in humiliation. The recent demise of Slobodan Milosevic comes to mind. The Butcher of the Balkans killed and maimed throughout the Nineties, only to die in a jail cell and perhaps by his own hand.
I think that these cartoons - whether they make fun of Jews, Muslims, Africans, North Americans or whoever - are tools to propagate hatred so that those who thirst for power may pursue whatever path is necessary that will enlarge the scope of their power. The people of this world are just putty in their hands.
Isn’t there anyone who will stand up and say that he or she has had enough of the hatred that is being disseminated around the world? Perhaps, loving our neighbour is just a stupid pipe dream.
As in the novel 1984, we are constantly proving that two plus two does make five. Two wrongs do make a right and the more wrongs, the merrier. It may be entirely possible that we will blow everyone up in the process of proving this but prove it we will.

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As we move from Black History Month in February to Women’s History Month in March, people may wonder why we need these months at all. There definitely are a lot of theme months and some months even do double duty. In the health areas, we find Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Family Health Month and Physical Therapy Month. Minorities have American Indian Heritage Month, Hispanic Heritage Month and Polish Heritage Month. This doesn’t even begin to look at all the weeks such as Freedom to Read Week (this week, by the way), Teen Reading Week and School Bus Safety Week. As a librarian, I’m always looking for a decorating theme to highlight some good books but surely, this isn’t a good enough reason to bury the calendar under a myriad of themes.
As far as the History and Heritage months go, they may make up for the enormous gaps in how history is taught in our schools. Our teenagers are taught world history in Grade 8, Quebec and Canadian history in Grade 10 and World History again in Grade 11 but only if they opt to take it. It’s really hard to get into much depth when you run from Ancient Egypt through World War II in one year.
Then, once we get out into the working world, the most history that the majority of us come into contact with is a movie that will probably make many errors to keep the plot going. I have no problem with that. Movies are usually produced to entertain and make their backers a lot of money. No one is too worried about educating the public.
Over February, there were some good documentaries on Black History on a few television stations and a few movies that got me interested in reading books on the topic. I’ve often found the same to be true for women’s history. The fight to achieve one’s rights makes some pretty dramatic reading and there are more than a few heroes in the American Civil Rights movement and in the Nineteenth Century Suffragette movements in Great Britain, Canada and the United States.
Many of us know who the American suffragette, Susan B. Anthony, was but what about Canadian women like Nellie McClung? Because of McClung’s tireless efforts, Manitoba was the first province to give women the right to vote and run for public office. She was a bestselling author and worked for a wide variety of social causes. Another memorable Canadian feminist was Agnes Macphail. In 1921, she was the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons. Macphail promoted workers’ rights and pensions for seniors.
These women are an important part of Canadian history and many of us don’t know their names because we flew through Canadian history in a race to get to the end of term so that we could pass the provincial exams. Luckily, many teachers are finding ways to give students the chance to go deeper into Canadian history through research projects and we can only hope that teenagers come out knowing more than what year the British North America Acts were passed. Dates are quickly forgotten but a good story will be remembered far longer.
So don’t be so quick to roll your eyes when a month is chosen to promote a health or historical theme. It may be an opportunity to learn something that you didn’t know before and it can’t hurt any of us to smarten up a bit.

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I’ve spent the past week reading about the cartoon controversy and the ensuing demonstrations and burning of embassies in the Middle East. Once again, I am challenged in this blog to add to the media frenzy with something more articulate than “Oh, wow” or “Yikes!” Frankly, it’s not easy because I could get into trouble. Luckily,the trouble that I will get into is not life threatening.
Critiques of some of my blogthat were meant to be funny have come in the form of mildly cajoling emails and one or two Letters to the Editor. I have been castigated for making fun of people who shop early for Christmas presents and for my continuous jibes about the College Street bridge in Lennoxville while it was being repaired. What I thought were gently humorous digs at every day life issues were taken quite seriously by readers and though I apologised for offending these readers, I did not apologise for writing my opinions and for describing my own observations of the world. Any columnist worth his salt welcomes this kind of criticism because it means that the blogs are being read and discussed
What I find completely frightening is what happens if a cartoonist, columnist or newspaper editor does not gauge his reading audience well and goes out of the bounds of what is thought to be good taste or appropriate standards. It’s a new world out there. Salman Rushdie wrote a book and received a death sentence for what he put in it. Do authors and cartoonists deserve to die because they express beliefs that are considered blasphemous by others?
I also wonder about the innocent victims of this controversy. I cannot understand why the embassies of these countries were burned down and why their industries are being boycotted. The guy who works on the floor of a Danish cheese packaging plant has absolutely nothing to do with the cartoonist who drew the controversial cartoons yet he is losing his job because that cartoonist and his editor didn’t use some common sense.
Anyone in our society has to recognize that there are lines that we all draw concerning free speech no matter how liberal we think we are. No sane person would allow a six year old to watch a pornographic film or a hard-core violent film. Most of us would think that the photos that the American soldiers took in the Abu Ghraib prison as a joke were horrible. Our society does not look kindly on jokes that humiliate minority groups or women or for that matter, jokes about the Holocaust. It’s something that you don’t put in a newspaper.
In Canada, we have used the expression, the Two Solitudes, to describe English and French Canada. This is nothing compared to the Two Solitudes that our world seems to have been divided into. Many people within the Middle East feel that it is their people who are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan and now the West is kicking their most sacred icons and principles that go beyond discussion: their religion, their deity.
In the West, we are used to making fun of everything, literally everything. Our stand-up comics crack jokes about God, racial groups, sex, you name it. We pride ourselves on the much cherished freedom to discuss and make fun of any topic that we want to. Yes, it’s a relief to live in such a world but in reality, the world we live in is a much smaller place as some Danish cartoonists found out in the past few weeks.
Whether we like it or not, there is another solitude out there and they don’t think that we’re one bit funny. This is a truly frightening reality and one that we will be dealing with for years to come. Both sides have got to start talking to one another instead of screaming; we have to find out about one another instead of aiming guns or cartoons.

Some things aren’t funny anymore; they are serious, deadly serious.

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I guess I won’t be cross-country skiing any time soon and neither will you. Yes, January thaw came and stayed for all of January and it slipped right into February. It kind of took the wind right out of January Thaw’s romantic sails.
In the course of a long and argumentative life, I’ve debated with people over the existence of January Thaw. I’ve always known there to be an island of sanity in our climate - that window of opportunity to walk outside and feel the breeze on one’s face without pain. It’s like a weather-holiday after Christmas yet there are many unbelievers. I consider these people who don’t believe in January Thaw to be like those Bush supporters who believe that global warming is a bunch of nonsense.
Yet this year, it’s hard to deny global warming and when you have rain almost every day, you can’t call it much of a thaw. It’s a New York City winter that has moved up north and is here to stay. It may not be painful but it certainly isn’t very much fun. An Eastern Townships winter implies a certain amount of frolicking in the snow with the aid of snow-frolicking tools such as skis, sleds, fancy sleds (GTs), snowmobiles and snowshoes.
This winter, I have aged 30 years as I do the shuffle down my driveway to my car and I’m not the only one. Several gentlemen of my acquaintance have admitted to doing some shuffling of their own for fear of breaking an arm, leg or hip and these guys are under fifty. If we have winter after winter like this, we will need to get ice climbing shoes just to walk outside.
The summers are getting hotter, the winters are getting warmer – call me crazy but I believe in global warming. President Bush claimed in a 2001 speech that the climate runs in patterns – he says it gets warmer for awhile and then colder. It’s just a natural pattern. I think that this is all wishful thinking on his part. Nobody wants to tell millions of Americans or for that matter, people in up and coming developing countries such as India and China, that they can’t drive an SUV, that gas will never be affordable again and that the future doesn’t have limitless possibilities. The big surprise is that we may have to limit ourselves so that we have a future at all.
Like many Canadians, I will be curious to see how long Canada remains signed on to the Kyoto Accord now that the Conservative Party is in office. In addition, Prime Minister Harper may decide that he no longer needs the services of Rick Mercer to cajole Canadians into figuring out ways to help Canada meet its goals in reducing greenhouse emissions. Of course, it is industry that should be the real target and no Prime Minister wants to tug on the coattails of big companies about how much they’re chugging into the air. It doesn’t matter whether he or she is a Liberal or a Conservative. It’s much easier to go after little people.
Meanwhile, it may be time to throw all our snow frolicking stuff into this summer’s garage sale, stock up on some very good umbrellas and shoes with excellent traction. Winter just isn’t what it used to be.

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Relaxation in a bottle…and dishes that sparkle too
Modern technology never fails to excite me with the new tools it comes up with to make my life easier and better. Just last weekend, I was shopping at the supermarket and I realized that we were running out of liquid dishwashing soap. I noticed that one brand, a name brand, was on sale and that it came in a wide variety of scents: cucumber, lemon, etc. Then I noticed the very last one, aromatherapy…and the label said anti-stress!
Now, just imagine the multi-tasking possibilities here! I can actually wash a pot and relax at the same time. Yes, there’s a sucker born every minute but the bottle is on sale and promising me that those scented bubbles will fight my stress. How can I resist? Can this be false advertising? Not in Canada.
Ever since childhood, there’s a side of me that…now, this is hard to confess to such a wide audience, but here goes: there’s a side of me that likes commercials. I’ve always known why. Commercials have happy endings and I want to believe that happy endings are possible.
Sixties commercials never failed to have happy endings. If the lady switches to the right brand, everything is right. If the neighbour’s sheets on the clothesline are cleaner than your sheets, you listen to her advice, buy the detergent and then your family really, really loves you. Buy that whitening toothpaste and you get the boyfriend, the big job, the trip to Florida and the luggage. Commercials make life seem so simple. If you have the money, there’s always an easy solution.
Life is very busy these days so if a dishwashing soap can lull me into a state of bliss two steps up from comatose, why should I resist? Of course, it’s all fun and games till we find out that the secret ingredient in the soap is illegal.
All kidding aside, stress is a very real problem. Just the other day, a friend passed on a news headline to me that says that most teenagers are so stressed out and depressed that if they were in this condition twenty years ago, that state of mind would require professional help. Nowadays, we just accept it.
One journal states that the rate of teenaged depression may be as high as 20%. It does go on to say that many of these cases will be short-lived but if you think of the pressures that teenagers are under between school, sports, extracurricular activities along with the strain in relationships among family and peers, this figure is not so surprising.
After all, we expect sixteen and seventeen year olds to pick an area of concentration in CEGEP. I barely know what I’m doing with my life now. How can we possibly expect kids to figure out what they want to do at such a young age when they can barely decide which jeans to wear to school? That’s stress.
Now I know better than to suggest that if we get teenagers to wash our pots and pans with anti-stress aromatherapy dishwashing detergent, their stress will go down the drain with the grease, dirt and grime. I don’t think this one has a happy ending.
Advertisers will keep stressing our kids and us out because we can never have enough and all the bottles of aromatherapy soap won’t make us stop and realize that maybe, just maybe, there are a lot of whistles and doo-hickies that we really don’t need.
If we’re not stressed, we’re not spending.

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Anglophones: The Invisible Voters of Quebec

About two weeks ago, I received a phone call from a nice lady who was working for one of our local candidates. She asked me who I was voting for.
“I’m sorry but I never discuss my vote.”
“All right, then, but I hope you make the right decision.”
“I’m sure I will.”
As I hung up the phone, I thought, “I just lied.” Even now, I’m not sure that I made the right decision last Monday because, apart from the debates that I watched before the election, very few of the candidates vied for my vote or working to tell me, an English-speaking Quebec voter, why I should vote for him…except for Mr. Harper.
For the past few weeks, Mr. Harper’s television commercials exhorted me to “stand up for Canada.” These commercials reminded me many times of the Liberal Party’s wrongdoings and repeatedly urged me to trust Mr. Harper as a leader. Sure thing, that is what I’d expect - but what about the Liberals? What about the New Democratic Party? For that matter, what about the Bloc? Where were they?
During the debate, Mr. Layton urged us not to vote strategically but it is more than evident and not surprising that our federal candidates campaigned very strategically. Anglophone Quebeckers were unimportant and were to be sacrificed for more significant constituencies in Ontario and British Columbia.
As a television watcher, I suppose that I should be grateful. I was spared all the cheesy advertisements, the sincere appeals to patriotism and the promises of a better tomorrow but as a voter, I still feel hurt. I feel inferior. Harper loves us but nobody else does. You’d think that even Mr. Duceppe would have tried to convince us that his vision of a sovereign Quebec was a really, really good one but he probably knew better. He assumed that there was no chance Anglophones would buy that one.
The Liberals probably thought that we would vote Liberal because Mr. Martin is one of us, a Quebecker so why bother convincing us of what we already know. As for Mr. Layton, the NDP have long given up on us. You didn’t see so much as a poster in Lennoxville, a university town that could be ripe for a few votes from the stereotypical university leftie. They seem to have some sort of misguided thinking that Quebeckers are allergic to the NDP. On the other hand, you have to hand it to the Green Party. At least, they weren’t so cheap as to count the cost of a few posters.
Those of us English speaking Quebeckers who care about the future of our country made it our business to figure out what was really behind all the promises and party platforms. We then made our decision as best as we could. I think, however, that it is sad that three out of the four national parties did not even think that English Quebec was worth a few television commercials and in some cases, a few posters. This last election may bring a new meaning to the slogan, Je me souviens.

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Next Christmas, No Electronics
This is my New Year’s Resolution: I will never, never, never (may I repeat never) give anyone an electronic present for Christmas again. No one will get anything that requires the installation of software (not compatible), the connections of cables to a computer (not compatible) and the transfer of music from one electronic device to another (it sounds like mush!) This is my gift to me next Christmas and to you. If you had a similar experience to mine this past Christmas, you may not have come to the realization so I am here to help you come to your senses.
There is something about electronic devices and computerized contraptions that bring out the frustrated and ready-to-smash-dishes side in a tired human being no matter what age that human being may be when said doo-hickey does not function the way it should at 7:00 AM Christmas morning.
By the way, how many of us feel like highly functioning computer technicians at 7:00 AM Christmas morning? I know that I don’t. I also know that I don’t want to even try to feel like one. I want to open gifts and enjoy them without the gift putting me to work. In fact, electronic gifts are not the only culprit in making Christmas mornings less than relaxed. Remember electric trains? What about Lego sets? All these gifts do is force you to work and work and work some more.
I have to make breakfast so why do I want to be a computer technician, architect and/or engineer at an ungodly hour of a morning that is a holiday? Parents, next Christmas, let’s put the holiday back into holiday and give our kids gifts that require little thought on our part.
Actually, that’s the beauty of what ever comes in a Christmas stocking. Chances are, it goes on your feet, hands or head or you can eat it. The stuff is usually small, simple and pleasant. The work comes with the bigger gifts. This is certainly not an easy problem to solve. Clothes are no good because chances are, they won’t fit. You will have to go back to the store and fight crowds of like-minded cranky people who are returning gifts.
Video games that don’t hook up to a computer may also seem like an easy if expensive solution but think of the noise and blood-guts-and-gore factors. What’s so pleasant about getting the latest video game to work so that your beloved young ‘un can kill hundreds of cyber-people? Remember peace on earth, good will toward men? Can’t we spare a little good will for all those animated types who are destined to get the bullet over and over again?
Honestly, I think it’s back to wind-up toys for me…or dolls. I don’t care that my children are young adults. Next year, they’re getting dolls and I will blissfully send them back to their rooms to play with their new acquisitions and let me get another hour’s sleep. Better yet, if they’re so mature, maybe it’s time that they make breakfast.
Next New Year’s Day, I will wake up and not have to figure out a thing except where I put the Tylenol and Alka-Seltzer. That sounds like an easy one to handle. If every day could be that simple, it would surely be a Happy New Year.

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