If you missed Stephen Lewis on CBC Radio 1’s Sounds Like Canada today – and most Canadians do – then you missed something spectacular, Wagnerian, Olympian. That is, if global indifference to massive suffering is your idea of greatness. (Yet it is “great”, in the sense of “of enormous scale or importance”, in the sense that World War I was the “Great War” until its sequel arrived. Not so much, I admit, in the low-impact vernacular “Great party, eh?” sense. End of Great Paranthetical Remark.) If you’re interested in more, I wrote “We Should All Be Listening” for Wednesday journals. So far, no takers.
I spent a terrific Saturday in the library of a local elementary school, sitting around with other moms and dads and grandmas. (The guy knows how to party.) We were trying to learn a few things about how to do our parenting, our partnering, and all our family and community relationships better. My youngest son goes to a school that uses Steiner educational principles. If you’ve heard of “Waldorf” schools and methods, that’s the more common name for schools that are based on the teachings of the philosopher Rudolf Steiner. Anyway, though I’ve been in education and childrearing since, oh, the invention of chalk, there was good stuff there.
A consultant named Gene Campbell had been brought in, and she helped us all to learn a little more about this approach to education that is doing such fine things for our kids, and which has such promise for the building of communities, too. I wrote an article for local press consumption, which you can find in the On Second Thought section of this site.
Yesterday morning, I certainly had other work to do, but I got waylaid by the words of Stephen Lewis. Again. My wonky CD player refused to play, so I flipped to radio instead. Before I could find a music station, there was Stephen Lewis, Canada’s closest thing to public service sainthood. (And, not just by the way, there was the Mighty Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio 1. ‘Bout time, but I’m grateful anyway. Hello again, Shelagh!)
Sounds Like Canada was the program, and if only the public voice of this country was consistently as eloquent, as impassioned, as ferociously good as Stephen Lewis’s is, we would be the conscience of the world. We’d be changing it. If you don’t know who he is, you should. He was a New Democratic Party politician, one of Ontario’s youngest elected Members of Provincial Parliament, and the party’s leader for a time. He is someone that thoughtful Canadians have loved to listen to, even when they were on the opposite side of the political fence. He is well beyond politics now. After all, can you name a party that is in favour of disease and death?
Lewis has more recently been Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations, a key guy at UNICEF, and for the last few years, he has put his entire being on the line as Special Envoy to the U.N.’s Secretary-General for AIDS in Africa. He is a voice crying in the wilderness, it must sometimes seem to him, but what a voice!
Here is what he said about another of our Canadian heroes of noble frustration, General Roméo Dallaire. Lewis was reviewing Dallaire’s Shake Hands With the Devil, his witness to the Rwandan slaughter. Lewis wrote, “Here was a man who screamed into the void. No one listened, no one cared, no one heard. But he never stopped screaming. He valued every human life. He wept for every human loss. He never gave up.” It takes one to know one, I’d say.
Stephen Lewis speaks in gorgeous sentences, even paragraphs, so his is a peculiarly artful scream about another African holocaust, where more than half the world’s HIV-positive people live and where hundreds die every day. “I have spent the last four years watching people die,” Lewis says. “Die unnecessarily,” he adds for what must be the ten thousandth time. And people are listening, people and governments do care, but the pace of response is maddeningly slow.
He reels at the lack of urgency in rolling out effective medications that are available right now. He rages that promised resources from Western governments are filtering through at only half the pledged rate. He rails at his own employers, the United Nations, for not quickly taking advantage of the international trust and the talent at their disposal. And it is a source of rueful pain to Stephen Lewis that his own country, the one that challenged the world’s wealthy nations to commit 0.7 percent of their Gross Domestic Product to international development, is nowhere near this development goal. Our great statesman Lester Pearson first suggested this target in 1969, but only a few northern European nations actually meet it. “The United States thumbs its nose at it”, Lewis says, and Canada doesn’t do much better in this commitment to global justice. And he can’t understand why.
The entire social fabric of a continent is unravelling. Whole generations of teachers and doctors, mothers and fathers are disappearing. “In Malawi, which has, what, 10 or 12 million people, there are two pediatricians left!” Lewis tells of visiting a hospital there. On the night shift, caring for 60-70 patients at the end of their struggle with AIDS – “patients who would be in intensive care in Canada” – was ONE nurse. One. He is obsessed and exhausted by the overwhelming flood of numbers like this and stories like this, stories of people that he has visited and comforted and profoundly mourned. I’ve heard him speak in person three times in the past two years. Each time, I have wept desperately and wondered, How long can he keep doing this?
I wept again yesterday morning. Shelagh Rogers, I think, managed not to, but she had the same question. Lewis says he wants to stay at it until he sees the tide turning on this pandemic, which will kill tens of millions if it doesn’t turn soon. He looks for that point where the masses of infected and affected people – poignantly, the burden is disproportionately carried by women and by innumerable orphans – can have some hope that help is indeed coming. He thinks that could be in the next 18 months or so, if the lumbering apparatus of international action could be moved to act. Disasters on a far smaller scale – the Indian Ocean tsunami, hurricanes in the southern United States, and the Pakistan earthquake – prove that the world can be a compassionate and responsive place. The pandemic of AIDS, though, unfolds more slowly, with fewer dramatic images, and for many reasons seems to require more planning, and a more humane and more concentrated kind of imagination.
And Mr. Lewis’s plans? His disposition, and his political upbringing, tell him to “keep on fighting!” Well, last night [October 18] in Vancouver, he gave the first of his five Massey Lectures. Winnipeg, Montreal, Halifax and Toronto will follow. He titles the lectures “Race Against Time”, and it is his current survey of the situation faced especially by sub-Saharan Africa in dealing with the AIDS pandemic. “Don’t ever think the African nations can’t do it themselves, if they are given the help they need,” he says. And will keep on saying. Over and over again. In that erudite, cracking, not-quite-despairing voice that is one of Canada’s great gifts to the world.
The Massey Lectures will be on CBC Radio’s Ideas program in the week of November 7-11. You can find out more about AIDS in Africa, and how you can help, at StephenLewisFoundation.org .
Sometimes on a Saturday night, my little family island is flooded by youth. And no, I’m not talking about Retro Night in my mirror-balled basement – I mean actual young people, teens and twenty-somethings. You might call it clear evidence of local warming. Or you might blame it on Tropical Storm Elise. She blew into my living room last week.
Elise is a university student, a colleague of mine when she’s not doing that, and a WOW (Woman of the World) pretty much all the time. When her college offered her a chance to go to Poland for the Walk of the Living – an international youth gathering to commemorate the Holocaust – she leaped at the chance. And we all jumped at our chance to find out about the Walk she made. And how it affected her idea of Living.
The story was intriguing right from the start. The Canadian Jewish Congress decided, on this 60th anniversary of World War II, that the trip wouldn’t be just for raising the consciousness of Jewish kids, as it had been in the past. This time, they were joined by Christians (hi, Elise!), Muslims and those of no particular faith. Interviewers asked tough pre-selection questions: What’s the most difficult thing you’ve ever gone through? How does tolerance show itself in the way that you live?
That didn’t prepare them for airline security – they were flying El Al, Israel’s state airline. Saying they’re careful is like observing that Michael Jackson is a little unusual. Elise was embarrassed, tired, a bit angry (“Didn’t I already answer that? Another scanner? I have to take off what?”), even when she knew the routine was for her own safety. And that the visibly Middle Eastern students were put through a wringer even tighter than the one squeezing her, fair-haired and blue-eyed as she is. Yes, she thought. This must have been how it was. A little bit like that.
And then it was a trans-Atlantic plane ride, and then it was get-off-and-get-on-the-bus to Auschwitz. The bus to Auschwitz. (Quiz: What do you do if you’re losing the war and your enemy is closing in on your concentration camp full of human skeletons whose only crime was ethnicity or lifestyle? One answer: A forced march with beatings can be effective; 56,000 human skeletons were convinced to stop living in only five days.) Auschwitz is now a museum of memory. Display case after display case of human hair. Shoes. Star of David armbands. On and on, all the artifacts of the long and horribly dead. The Genocide Show.
Elise felt terrible because she didn’t feel worse. No tears yet. Jet lag, exhaustion, and a wicked culture shock, sure, but not the tidal waves of empathy and disgust and sorrow that (she guessed) she was looking for. She wondered if something was wrong with her heart. This was Auschwitz, and she was numb. Perhaps just a little, she later thought, like the Jewish people unloaded from cattle cars at this same Polish camp more than six decades before. The same ones who’d been harassed, then restricted, then rounded up for “resettlement”. Disbelief. Shock. Numbness. They must have felt this, too. A little bit like this.
You’ll be glad to know that Elise’s heart was fine. Through the March of the Living between Auschwitz and Birkenau, where the gas chambers killed over a million Jews and thousands of other political prisoners; through visits to the Jewish ghettoes in Krakow and Warsaw; through the visits to concentration/extermination camps at Plaszow (where those that Mr. Schindler couldn’t protect ended up), and at Belzec and Majdanek (where Elise spent Mother’s Day); and, through wrenching conversations with survivors, with the “hidden children”, and with her fellow students, Elise’s mind and heart were stretched and shattered and consoled and shattered again.
For her, the calm centre of this hurricane of feeling was always Anita. Anita rode the bus with the non-Jewish kids. It turned out that she was one of the “hidden”, a Jewish girl whose family had been herded into a ghetto, who was passed secretly out of that ghetto in a burlap bag just before her parents were murdered. (She was 8 when her father dug his own grave before being shot.) She, like many, was sheltered in a Polish Catholic family and raised as a Christian. (One of the other “hidden children” grew up to be a Catholic priest who found out, many years later, that he was Jewish.) Anita’s story became the understandable, human-scale core of an incomprehensible crime.
And these were the questions that the Canadian kids from all backgrounds asked themselves: How did this get started? (Shunning, blaming; from burning books to burning the people who own them is not so big a step.) Where was humanity when all this was going on? (A better question, surely, than “Where was God?”; we don’t seem to care as much where God is when stock prices are high.) Where does hope come from amidst such industrial-strength inhumanity?
Their answers were powerful, life-changing, and ultimately hopeful. For Elise, the most pressing question was simple: What are we going to do about what we have seen? Her commitment, and that of a tightly-bonded group that had been strangers five days earlier, came from a Hebrew expression – Tikkam Olam – which means “to repair the world”. The experience made them want to take on this repair mission personally. To bear witness. To speak their truth. To move the world, just a little.
And that is why Elise was in my living room, and that is why a whole bunch of kids came to hear her. The world feels a little less ragged after a night like that, though my heart was a bit frayed.
So what’s the point of this website? In an earlier conception, Mad Martin had called the site “Howden Movement”, and I was perplexed.
“What, I’m a movement already? The masses are going to rally behind my brilliant leadership on the way to, um, well, wherever it is I’m going?”
“No, no, not exactly, it was more like—“
“Howden Movement. Howden Movement. Sounds like a promo for laxatives, or something. You know, BMs? Does anybody call them that any more? Nurses, maybe?”
“No, not really, it was just—“
Not that I was going to let Businessman Martin get a word in edgewise or anywise. Because this was my website, first and only, and I’m a Name Guy, shoulda seen how long it took to name my kids (or my intramural flag football team, for that matter). I kept running prospective names by whatever unfortunate soul happened to call me or walk by. Not to mention that The Perfect Choices were already taken. Probably some greasy speculator in domain names, selfish jerk!
And then I remembered why I’d consulted My Favourite Martin in the first place – he knows how to make things happen, and JamesHowden.com is now one of them. Nifty! The whole point of the site is to get some of my writing out there, to get ME in motion toward long-imagined destinations. (Howden Movement: that would be the opposite of HowdInertia.) So, this is a shameless forum for my ideas and projects. It may prompt you to write to me, and this would be delicious. (I can’t promise replies, but the world is full of possibility. If you catch clumsy thinking, heaven forbid, typos, let me know. Keep in mind that Canadian spelling does have stronger links to French sources for English words, like “centre” and “odour”.)