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Back to Adolescence. Again!

Posted by :James Howden On : February 28, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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I’ve been a Substitute Creature for the last couple of days at a local high school. I do it all: French, Drama, History, Geography, English (of all things!)… I did demure this morning when a Tech class was in the range of Mr. Flexibility choices, although I WILL remind you that I won the grade 9 Industrial Arts Award at Caledonia High School, lo, those many years ago, where I made the most absurd and sickly book shelf in the history of design but aced all the tests.

Given my stupendously modest earnings as a writer this past year, I’m courting the don’t give up your day job Day Job, and I’m looking in the direction of education — where I spent the bulk of my professional career — rather than writing for government contract or speech-makers. I’m convinced that my own stuff would wither away if I was writing for other people from nine to five, though I can imagine writing after the classroom fog lifts and I’ve scrubbed the chalk off my fingers (sleeves, thighs, forehead). I’ll be off to make the Art of the Theatre sparkle and inspire young minds in half an hour. (I sense a movie coming on…)

I am finally getting to my long-overdue notes on my Guitarzan odyssey, that ODY-ous quest (the “Old Dog Year”) to become a guitar player a decade or three after my teens. (The first 150 days or so are already posted in the “On Second Thought” section of the site. You should Write Me! if there aren’t a couple more posts up by the weekend.) And the new quote for the week, a day late, is up in the “He Said/She Said” box. So much for the mind, so few photos. Speaking of photos, remind me to offer a link to our Guadeloupe travels; I should also be getting to writing about this cool trip before the memories fade.

Anne Hines (on religion and perspective)

Posted by :James Howden On : February 26, 2007
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“When I meet God, whatever that is – whatever *I* am – I feel we will laugh about the things I thought were important, and cry over the things I didn’t see as important.”

Anne Hines, writer and United Church of Canada pastor-in-training. She added — I believe this was from a radio interview — “My current goal is to graduate while there still is religion!” There’s a darkly pregnant joke.

Shabbat and Beyond: All the News That’s Good to Read

Posted by :James Howden On : February 24, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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We were at Paul and Michelle’s last night for Shabbat supper, and after the blessings offered in the kiddush, one of the many topics of intelligent conversation — in and around the expressive needs of four boys between 5 and 12 — was Michelle and Paul’s plans for me. (There are always plans.) So here is Michelle’s latest: she was enlisting my writing — I guess, ’cause it couldn’t have been my capital investment — in support of the OGN Network, a medium of information and insight that carries Only Good News. None of us are getting enough. (Good news, that is.)

And today, shuffling through a deck of last week’s newspapers, I found a superb OGN entry. It was an obituary, actually, for a brilliant and world-embracing scientist named Bent Skovmand, a Dane who had become one of the planet’s foremost agricultural researchers. His mission, self-described and self-imposed, had been to end world hunger. He didn’t quite get there, but his travels and studies allowed him to be part of assembling tens of thousands of varieties of grain and hybridizing more resistant, easily grown and nutritious seed.

His death interrupted what may be his greatest life’s work, and one of the most exciting, almost science fiction-like projects for global betterment that I can imagine. It’s one of those under-reported (I’d certainly never heard of it) stories that is the bright lining behind a dark and fearful canopy: while nuclear arsenals are still capable of massive annihilation, and other less spectacular threats loom over humanity, Skovmand has been heading the Global Crop Diversity Trust. The Trust has set itself the challenge of gathering and preserving the entire world’s agricultural foundation in case of catastrophes local or global that destroy our ability to feed ourselves. This is vision. This is looking forward.

Check this link: it will give you a detailed description of what is variously called the “doomsday vault”, the “Fort Knox of seeds”, being built with Norwegian leadership and international cooperation on a tiny Norwegian island far above the Arctic Circle. There, by 2008, millions of seeds composing the foundation of world agriculture will be safe, not only from nuclear war but also from the worst-case climate change scenario. How do you like them apples (or the 100,000 kinds of rice, or the 1000 types of bananas), Michelle? WONDERful, it is.

Blaming the Yanks: Our National Sport?

Posted by :James Howden On : February 23, 2007
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Category: All About Sports

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There are lots of arguments made to justify the continued existence of nearly consequence-free fighting in the NHL and its Canadian junior hockey feeder system. The first, and most prominently used, is the “safety valve” defence, which says that hockey is a fast and violent sport and that the occasional furious dust-up is an essential way to blow off steam. (Meanwhile, of course, the ferocious collisions and trench warfare of American football have never led the NFL or any league to permit fighting. Curious.)

The second rationalization is a bit more slippery and more difficult to refute, at least in Canada. It’s also dishonest. Fans of Our Game have long indulged in a national pastime to explain why hockey, alone among major sports (more on this “major” business later), allows players who scrap to serve a brief term in the “sin bin” – usually at no competitive disadvantage to their teams – and then return to the fray. The explanation runs as follows. Canadians are sophisticated fans who’ve played the game and understand its nuances, skills and graces. Heck, they can even follow the movement of the puck on TV without any technical trickery. (Friggin’ Americans and their glowing puck! What a joke, we snort merrily and pat each other on the back.) Fighting? Well, we can take it or leave it, but the NHL needs to keep it, eh, because that’s all the Americans want to see and we gotta market the game to people who don’t really get it. Get it?

Well, last night’s game between the Ottawa Senators and the Buffalo Sabres turned into a Rodney Dangerfield joke: Hey, I went to the Gardens to watch some boxing last night…and a HOCKEY game broke out! A thundering (and legal) bodycheck injured a Sabre, so the Sabres sent in the clowns. When all the gloves and sticks had been picked up, three players had been kicked out (unusual in hockey) including the Senators’ star goalkeeper. Today’s Ottawa sports conversation is dominated by gushing admiration for “Sugar” Ray Emery, a goalie who loves to fight, and the snobbery of Argument the Second is punctured. It’s US that digs the fisticuffs, not the U.S.

This game — no, not the game, the low-skill boxing — was the number one story in Ottawa today, and likely superseded, in every Canucklehead hockey conversation, the lengthy roster of important late-season games played last night . And boy, it’s gonna be a doozy tomorrow night when the Sabres come back to our barn! They’ll dress McGrattan for sure! (Brian McGrattan is a minor-league hockey player with big-league fists, and is Ottawa’s official “enforcer”. Though he rarely dresses, and plays little when he does, he is among the most popular players. He gets advertising gigs for car dealers, while the Sens captain Daniel Alfredsson, a highly skilled Swede, doesn’t.) I heard the replays of the radio call, and gleeful giddiness just oozes from the commentators. Ray Emery has been a surprise with his fine play this year, when he was expected to be Ottawa’s number two keeper, but he is now officially a Legend in this city. The fawning comments of the callers-in, and the extent to which this story shelved all others – that is, totally – were telling indicators. We can’t blame the Yanks for the existence of fighting in hockey.

In fact, American kids with competitive aspirations play in a school-based system in which fighting is not allowed; drop ‘em and you’re out of the game and suspended further, just as in the European developmental hotbeds for most of hockey’s best playmakers. I don’t doubt that there are young American fans who get their motors running for the toe-to-toe stuff. It’s a pretty wild rush of adrenaline, and I dug it as a kid, too. But in the wider context of the American sports universe, the continued existence of fighting in hockey lumps the NHL in with roller derby or ultimate fighting (or “slamball”, the made-for-TV, full-contact combination of basketball and aggravated assault). It’s just not a sport to be taken entirely seriously, Canadian goonery and machismo notwithstanding.

In Praise of Taxes

Posted by :James Howden On : February 20, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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Thanks to the Princess of Quitealot, I just rediscovered a favourite column that I thought I’d lost track of. It came just in time, because here in Ottawa, the city is going through its annual budget wrangle, this time under the leadership of a Mayor who promised to ban tax increases. Meanwhile, the dollar buys less and many fine social programs are on the chopping block, not to mention the rising costs of policing and an aging infrastructure that, like every city, Ottawa has in abundance and will someday have to pay for…

It all has me muttering about politicians, particularly the stripe whose popularity is mainly based on an appeal to our greed and sense of entitlement. You worked hard for that money and if you elect us we’re going to put an insignificant but apparently sweet portion of it back in your pocket. After all, why should you care about anyone else? Besides, government stinks, and that’s why I’m running for it. Um, so it’ll, ah, stink lots less or something. Drives me nuts, but I know who they’re talking to. There’s no shortage of folks complaining about having to pay taxes. I’ve heard so much grousing about not getting anything from all the taxes we pay, and I don’t even get out of the house that much.

Anyhow, my bride found me exactly what I was looking for, an answer to all those death-and-taxes and woe-is-me whiners. I’m with the hard-working immigrant Canadian – he was an entrepreneur, and good at it – who told me, “Hey, if I’m paying taxes, that means I’m making some money. And it also means that I can give something back to a country that has given me so much.” You go, guy. The rant in question came from a 2004 article by Heather Mallick in the Globe and Mail. (And where have you gone, Ms. Mallick?* I couldn’t always agree with her, but she was opinionated and strong and often funny. She likely still is.)

She argues that taxes are the price we pay for civilization, and that we should consider that price a privilege; after all, the opposite of civilization is no picnic. Here’s part of what Mallick wrote in 2004, seeing the effect that Stephen Harper was beginning to have on Canadian popular thought. (Mr. Harper had become Conservative Party leader after having led the anti-taxation National Citizens’ Coalition.) I’ll spare you most of her partisan commentary, but here’s a précis of her column:

 How I dislike that remark about the only sure thing being death and taxes. Death is a hateful dragnet, except when it’s a blessed release. But Canadian taxes are great….I’m a fan of civilization and, you see, taxes enable civilization. To put it another way, taxes grease the skids of living well.

Other people say loudly, endlessly, tediously that they hate taxes…. Mr. Harper has many obsessions, but his main one is taxes….To him, taxes are tapeworms — “double, double, toil and taxes,” as Shakespeare’s witches didn’t put it — sneaking into your home to steal all that is good….

This is absurd. I pay taxes. I love taxes. When you work, the government yanks them off your paycheque…The government uses it to do all the stuff I’d rather not think about….[T]ruly, the word “tax” trails clouds of glory. Taxes ease our daily lives in ways we take for granted.

 They pay for traffic lights, sewers, garbage pickup, nicely dressed diplomats so we don’t show up at the G8 in golfing shorts, ferries, fish in general, nuclear power plant inspection, protecting the provincial flower (“Leave that wild rose alone, ma’am”), libraries, white-coated people who spring into action when you contract flesh-eating disease, building codes, schools, dangerous-toy advisories, keeping cable companies in line, clean air, truck inspections for airborne wheels, loan forgiveness, autopsies, campgrounds, divorce, licence plates so you can track the guy on the cellphone in his Humvee who hit you, fluoridation, teacher training, privacy, universities, fair elections, fire trucks, child guardianship, hazardous-waste control, name changes, hostels, museums, protocol (see golfing shorts), trees, zoning, high-tech passports, standards in general, notaries public, noise control, organ donation, human rights, disability, drainage, bingo permits, boating safety, French-language services, neighbour encroachment, aboriginal business aid, art galleries, adoption, jury duty, cemeteries, soil quality, spills response, tattoo parlour inspection, bank deposit insurance, street lighting, commercial ship registry, victim assistance (“there, there”), social insurance numbers, joint rescue (water and land, nothing to do with knees), aerial mapping, pesticide disapproval and savings bonds.

Without taxes, you would have to do all of the above yourself…. Fine, cut my taxes, and I’ll pick a task. I’ll take “spills response” and use recycled paper towels. Oh, you say the spill covers 2,000 hectares and it’s sticky, oily and toxic? I thought you meant coffee. Somebody call the feds. I’m a taxpayer!

Here in Canada, we believe in the public good, as in “good for all the public.” We don’t believe in private affluence and public squalor. We like to balance those two things.

Whenever you get upset by taxation, egged on by HelmetHead [Harper], think of an ill-considered purchase. Then figure out what that cash could have contributed to, had it been in government hands. A gleaming new hip for my mother? An extra season of Da Vinci’s Inquest? An ice rink for kids on the reserve?

Paying taxes is a means to a good end. Can we do it with a lighter heart, please?

(* Good ol’ Wikipedia informs me that Ms. Mallick is writing a book, and still knocking out columns for Chatelaine and writing commentaries on the CBC website.)

A Good Name

Posted by :James Howden On : February 19, 2007
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Category: All About Sports

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Do you remember what your favourite team’s home arena/stadium is called this week? If you live in Boston, you might not; according to the World Watch Institute – “independent research for an environmentally sustainable and socially just society” – the former Boston Garden has, since ’93, been renamed for a fee 34 times. (Mind you, some of it was for fun and maybe even charity: somewhere in there, it was briefly called the “Yankees Suck Centre”.)

If you’re under 30, you might not remember a time when the boards in an NHL rink were white, when you didn’t read an ad for doughnuts or dick-stiffeners every time there was a scuffle in the corner. And is it just me, or has NASCAR reached the point of parody? Check out the blizzard of sponsor names on every car and every set of coveralls. I laugh every time I see a picture of a driver. (Which, mercifully, isn’t often.) Anyway, thanks to the thousands of shiny new graduates every year with a higher education in Marketing — the Apocalypse is surely upon us — there are ever fewer places to bask in the absence of advertising.

World Watch just posted a few facts about stadium naming rights, which you may view here. A sample: Coca-Cola pays $6 mil annually to call Houston’s stadium Minute Maid Park; the current naming rights deals in the U.S. are estimated to be worth $4.3 billion a year. Presumably, the Big Corps have proven to themselves that this kind of outlay helps us all to spend as we are instructed to do.

The Institute ends with an ironic citation from Shakespeare, in which “a good name” refers to a person’s character and (deservedly) good reputation, and the speaker laments that such a thing cannot be bought. In our time, many smart people seem to believe that it can, though it requires a really short public memory. (Not much of a problem, it would seem.) Minute Maid Park began its life as Enron Field, for goodness’ sake. Kenneth Lay threw out the ceremonial first pitch on opening day. Lay and Enron: now there are some good names for you.

Citizenship at the Centre

Posted by :James Howden On : February 17, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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I wrote yesterday about two significant Canadian anniversaries and neglected a fascinating third. On July 1st we’ll be celebrating the country’s 140th birthday, but it was only 60 years ago yesterday that the first formal Canadian citizenship was granted. (Pour maple syrup on absolutely everything if you can name the first citizen to be formally recognized as such. *Answer below.) I may have heard this before, but was still lightly startled nonetheless to be reminded that it was only in 1947, 80 years in to the Great Northern Experiment, that we were regarded technically as anything other than British subjects. Imagine how French Quebeckers felt about that, when the thought crossed their minds. Or the Chinese or Ukrainian immigrants. Or the Irish.

And so our blazingly attractive Governor General, Michaëlle Jean, herself an immigrant from Haiti, spoke to new citizens yesterday. They gathered in the halls of the Supreme Court, welcomed by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin’s frosted beauty and class. They came from all over Canada, and they came from all over the world – the usual Canadian story, at least for the last 40 years or so. Their smiles were wide, and their comments afterward were uplifting and sweet. But even 60 years on, as they followed Madame Jean in reciting their citizenship pledge, they said one jarring thing before promising to obey Canadian law and fulfil their duties as citizens. The Oath begins with the affirmation “that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs and Successors…” I shuddered, just slightly, though there are elements of our civic structure that are much more harmful than this small anachronism. Yet symbols do matter.

I stand with those who suggest that quietly, upon the death of the Queen, in a dignified and quintessentially Canadian way, we should end the designation of the top British royal as our Head of State. There is value, however, in separating “pomp from power”, in having the symbolic head of the country distinct from the leader of the government. The institution of the Governor General fits this bill beautifully, and maintains valuable ties to traditions both deep and more recent. (We may need to revise our selection method, which despite its partisan potential has sent some marvellous Canadians to Rideau Hall, including but certainly not limited to the last two.)

Former GG Adrienne Clarkson, for whom I wrote during the last years of her mandate, was honoured Thursday at Rideau Hall with the unveiling of her official portrait. Prime Ministers past (Mr. Chrétien) and present (Mr. Harper) were there, along with most of the chief politicos of Ottawa, but more interesting to me were the artists and the throat-singing Inuit sisters; I’d never heard a live rendition of this eerie, sometimes guttural, viscerally powerful vocalizing before. I also got to hang out with my ol’ buddies and colleagues from the days when I left my house (and my sweatshirts) to go to work.

The Clarkson portrait is striking, a combination of nostalgia and toughness. She is calm and just a touch defiant, actually, as she stands on a frozen Canadian lake and stares down the horizon, or dares the future. It is the first vice-regal portrait to have snow in it. (Only in Canada, you say?) The warmth in it comes from a deep and sturdy friendship between Ms. Clarkson and the painter, Mary Pratt – the photo on which it was based was taken over 20 years ago – and also from the soft blue parka that she wears. I’d seen it (and that steely gaze) before. She has worn it since it was hand-made for her by an Inuit women’s collective thirty years ago, and she swears she always will.

It’s a good day to think a little about being a citizen. It reminds me that I need to flood our Tiny Perfect Backyard Rink® tonight, maybe just after seeing the legendary Willie P. Bennett and the ukulele wizard James Hill play their music tonight at the National Library and Archives. But first, a little Saturday afternoon hockey — good for the northern soul.

* And get those crèpes cooking if you somehow knew that Canada’s then-Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, was the first official citizen of this evolving country on February 16, 1947.

Thanks for Coming Out, John

Posted by :James Howden On : February 16, 2007
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Category: All About Sports

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Sigh. I hadn’t intended to join the gossipy legion by writing about one of the few pro athletes — and the first basketball player — to have publicly declared himself a homosexual. Former NBA forward John Amaechi, during his career, stood out more for his speech – he’s a British black man, unusually articulate for a pro athlete, quite apart from his distinctive accent – than for anything remarkable about his game (he was a blue collar banger) or, mercy me, for his sexual preferences. Apparently, he didn’t bring his gayness, as one current player put it, onto his teammates on several teams.

ESPN, though, has had wall-to-wall coverage of this sporting “breakthrough” because its book division has published Amaechi’s closet-busting memoir Man in the Middle. I’d heard about a few other player reactions – calm and dignified from the likes of Grant Hill (no surprise), nervous or incredulous or even mildly indignant comments from others – but it wasn’t until a former NBA All-Star left it all out on the floor during a radio interview that I decided to write about this. Until then, I agreed with the on-line NBA beat writer Tony Meija : a pro player coming out after his retirement has a high titillation rating, but it’s not a big hoops splash.

Having spent enormous amounts of time teaching, coaching and parenting teen-aged boys-to-men, the wariness of the players about homosexuality in a pro sports locker room is not surprising. Ignorance is not bliss for young men; I never quite get used to how frightened (and therefore often hateful) young men are about gays. (I remember showering with other guys after grade nine gym class being awkward for a day or two, and then it was just what you did. By the 1990s, it was hard to convince even 18-year-olds to shower after a workout. Spooky.) As for the Association players who are being quoted, most of them are under 25. These are tall and powerful kids who have lived in a protective jock bubble of privilege (and of encouraged ignorance) for much of their young lives. They wear expensive suits to the games, but many of them spend their off-court hours playing X-Box by the hour or trying – MUCH more successfully than the average high-schooler – to get laid. (Sex comes to them, like free shoes and team buffets.) Suddenly, microphones are under the noses of these (mostly) physically astonishing and intellectually sheltered youngsters, asking them to comment on difficult societal issues. Sometimes I feel sorry for them. Why do we expect them to know better?

Tim Hardaway, now, has stepped forward as the Bad Guy, the retired star who felt as free to publish his homophobia – “I hate gay people” – as Amaechi was to air his sexual preference. The NBA has duly banned him from its All-Star festivities in Las Vegas. (I’m relieved that the Association has maintained its moral purity.) Apart from everything else, Hardaway made a startling breech of the Athlete Interview Code, for which he has since apologized. (The AIC is re-enforced by public relations flacks and interview coaches, which Hardaway apparently doesn’t have access to anymore. We got to play hard or I know he’s got my back might not have the right connations in this case, but surely this was a perfect You know, it is what it is opportunity.) His regrets might be better late than never, but it sounds more like the classic non-apology I’m sorry if I offended anyone with my remarks than a self-examining I can’t believe I came out with such a bigoted statement; being a black man, I should surely know better than to judge people by externals, and I will work to educate myself…

As for Amaechi, he seems an honourable guy and I don’t doubt that this required some soul-searching on his part. However, the tendency of talking or writing heads to counter hateful attitudes by exalting his courage, his heroic leadership, strikes me as misplaced, too. He is, after all, selling a pile of books, and among his circle of friends and friendly colleagues that he cares about, I guess that his homosexuality is not news.

This story is so big because it’s tabloid fodder, gossipy tickling of the private life of someone who was somewhat famous for awhile. Sex is is pretty important and all, but how did it get to be the centre of our public conversations? It’s as if the frequency and geography (and the ratings!) of our private pleasures are what defines us, whereas any healthy adult knows that it makes for a small (if sweet) proportion of a human life. (My favourite experimental proof that sexuality is a tiny, private business was in high school classrooms. Even the gentlest suggestion that an adolescent’s parents are sexual beings elicits howls of protest and revulsion. Exactly my point. Their business, not ours. Touché!)

And in the Toronto Sun, of all places (speaking of tabloids and titillation, though the sports section is pretty good) appeared this thoughtful dismissal of “tolerance” and call for genuine respect from Toronto Raptors coach Sam Mitchell. Like Hardaway, he speaks his mind, but it is a more broad and interesting one, as much as one can tell from an upstairs bedroom office in Ottawa. Asked about Amaechi and the players’ reactions to the thought of a gay teammate, Mitchell hoped that a man would be judged by his character and his actions, not by private preferences over which he may not feel much choice. He added, “It shouldn’t be about tolerance. It should be about respect. People should treat people as human beings….Are people supposed to tolerate me because I’m black? Or are they supposed to treat me with respect because I’m a human being?”

Thanks for speaking out, Sam.  As for Mr. Amaechi, I hope this means more to him than money. I hope it’s true that his openness gives solace and encouragement to the alienated, but I’m with Pierre Trudeau: The State has no business in the bedrooms of the nation. Neither do we, except for our own.

Icing on Kyoto

Posted by :James Howden On : February 16, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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Two years ago today, the set of greenhouse gas-limiting Protocols agreed upon at Kyoto, Japan in 1997 officially came into force. Russia had just ratified the agreement, which brought the level of world participation to the necessary level for it to become internationally binding. Hmm. “Binding.” In a world political environment like ours, it’s an interesting adjective. Consider that the country which hosts the United Nations, ostensibly one of its biggest supporters, is hundreds of millions of dollars delinquent on its membership fees (which sounds like a lot of money, until you consider that the annual U.S. military budget is over 600 billion dollars). Consider that our current Prime Minister argues that because a previous government signed on to Kyoto, his need not follow through on it. Nationalism, and even partisan struggles within nations, continues to trump shared global necessities.

Meanwhile, it’s also two years today that the National Hockey League formally suspended its entire 2004-2005 season. Coincidental? Well, yes, but I’m going to draw a connection anyway, ‘cause I couldn’t flood our backyard for a rink until the end of January. Climate weirdness threatens northern sport, especially the sweetest kind, where children can romp on ice and snow for hours. (A YouTube video amusingly highlights the threats to pond hockey in Canada. Two minutes long: please click here to see it.) And Friends of the Earth says that several NHL players have joined to declare February 16 as “Save Hockey Day” across North America. (Presumably the gorgeous and endangered outdoor variety).

So the Kyoto Accord is two years old today. It’s a cute little toddler, shambling about in that charmingly unpredictable way and saying just the darnedest things. (We should pay attention to children.) May it grow stronger. May it survive its infancy.

Even Stephen?

Posted by :James Howden On : February 13, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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Had there been any doubt in my mind about the most important issues facing the world, it would have been dispelled yesterday morning by what I heard on CBC Radio. The Current is more than just a saucy, growling intro from The Voice, and before 9 am I had heard from two of the greatest voices of advocacy and awareness that Canada, that anyplace, has ever had: David Suzuki and Stephen Lewis. When these two get together, what do they talk about?

(Allow me to pause and hereby notify the Nobel people. For all his eloquent education and pleading and all that he has given to those suffering through the Great Pandemic in Africa, the former U.N. Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa has my nomination for the next Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Lewis should be the second Canadian¹ to join a club that includes Mandela, Teresa, King, Schweitzer and Matthai. The Peace Prize has been awarded since 1901, and will be until, well, until we have world peace, I suppose, but even then there will be milestones and heroes who bring ingenuity, progress and life to the world once war has been politically restrained or banished.)

These particular warriors of peace didn’t have long on the air, but as it so often is these days – and this is a good thing – climate change was the subject. David Suzuki, of course, was far ahead of the public curve on climate change, and has been a passionate defender of the environment for decades. His current campaign has him flying around the country (and, be assured, buying carbon offsets for all that plane travel) asking Canadians what they’d do if they were Prime Minister. Something I hadn’t known was that the first climate conference in 1988 – instigated by the Mulroney government and gathering scientists and leaders from around the world – was chaired by Stephen Lewis. This was several years before the famous Kyoto meeting and the Protocol that resulted from it, and Suzuki and Lewis were blunt and indignant: If we had done what we said we were going to do then, we wouldn’t be in the bloody mess we are today!

It was a superb (if too-brief) conversation with two mighty men, and a trip to The Current‘s website might allow you to play the interview. (It didn’t work for me.) One thing startled me, though: after all the wrenching speeches, tears (his and his audiences’), anguish and exhausting commitment he gave to the cause of African AIDS (and the resultant societal breakdown), I heard Lewis refer to climate change as the single biggest threat the world faces. (Especially to the already-ravaged African continent, not to mention all the low-lying islands and seashores that could be submerged by rising sea levels. Bangladesh.) Imagine the humility and detachment implicit in choosing this environmental threat over the ferocious pandemic he has been fighting from up-close, tongue and tooth and claw…

And there’s more: as big as these two issues are in their human toll – and you may be as worried about war, terrorism, bird flu, poverty, human rights, ethnic struggles – they are still symptoms of one fundamental problem facing the human race. It was elaborated in the 19th century by Bahá’u’lláh: “The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established.” I’ve been thinking about this astounding statement for many years, and I am all the more convinced that this is the heart of the matter. The argument is simple but the implications are gigantic: DISUNITY is the underlying disease of humanity, and beneath all the greatest global problems lies our difficulty in recognizing the essential oneness of the human race.

It’s an awfully big idea to get my head around on a Tuesday afternoon, but I offer it for your consideration all the same.


¹ Buy yourself a milkshake if you knew that Lester B. Pearson, before he was our Prime Minister, won the Nobel for his peacemaking efforts in the Suez Crisis.