Everybody’s been talking about it this week. Most people have an opinion. Some blame gangs. Others point their fingers at government. A few say the courts are too lenient. But just about everybody has something to say about guns and gun crime. It came up at the milk store the other day. One man looked at it this way.
“Hey, it could be a lot worse,” he said. “Look at Detroit.”
The day before the big opening the French police built a security fence around it. Workers set up wooden benches for an audience of 5,000. Rain left the glass and titanium-clad building on the Normandy beach glistening like a polished jewel. And inside the museum itself Canadian army cadets removed the pins from nearly 44,000 poppies – the pinless Remembrance symbols would be dropped from an aircraft during the ceremony – symbolizing the number of Canadians killed in the Second World War.
“I was on this beach 59 years ago,” Garth Webb said during the opening of the Juno Beach Centre on the D-Day anniversary in 2003. “And it’s just as big a thrill to be here today.”
The subject of Rob Ford’s reaction to reporter Daniel Dale’s investigation of land adjacent to the Toronto mayor’s property has come up in conversation a lot the past week. Some acquaintances of mine have described Dale’s poking around Ford’s backyard wall as provocative. Others find the Toronto mayor’s behaviour embarrassing. But I was taken aback by one friend’s criticism of Dale’s newspaper.
“That’s the ‘socialist’ Toronto Star for you,” he said.
In the days following 9/11, the West had revenge top of mind. Within days of the terrorist attacks, U.S. President George Bush promised his armies would avenge the deaths of the 3,000 Americans killed, claiming that the perpetrators were “Islamists commanded to kill Christians and Jews” and that they were therefore “wanted dead or alive.” Most in North America accepted his Wild West form of justice.
At the time, however, a professor at Concordia University in Montreal did not. Almost at his peril, journalist and educator Ross Perigoe criticized the powers that be, in particular the Montreal Gazette, for what he called its racist response to 9/11.
“I am in the Place des Arts metro station,” Perigoe cited a Gazette editorialist on Sept. 19, 2011, “I see three men, one wearing a turban. I start to shake.”
It’s been hard this year. Teaching and marking at the college – with a particularly challenging crop of journalism and broadcasting students – have nearly swamped me. Close friends have battled health problems, so I’ve spent what little time I had left trying to help. On top of that, I’ve found myself shouting at the radio in anger because the “the holiday season is here” advertisements began right after Halloween – they didn’t even wait for Remembrance Day to pass. Finding the Christmas spirit, this year, has proved tougher than usual.
I expect all that to change this Sunday, however, when I go to church.
I hear it among my colleagues often – industry complaints. Some of my friends in newspaper journalism worry about the uncertainty of their jobs. Others in the magazine business object to their copy being squeezed by over-sized ads. Meanwhile, those of my associates in the electronic media whine about insufficient pensions to cover their expenses when they retire.
I wonder if any of them would ever complain again, if they knew the plight of Cameroon Express editor Bibi Ngota. Earlier this year, while imprisoned at Kondengui prison in Cameroon, he died of “abandonment (and) improper care,” according to official records.
Why was he in jail? According to a press release from the organization Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE), “(He) was charged with ‘imitating the signature of a member of government,’” short for criticizing the Cameroonian government.
You’ve probably never heard of Luis Iribarren. Or Claudio Lagos. And you’ll likely never run across Dario Rojo in your lifetime. But, in fact, you do know them, all of them. They are three of the 33 men trapped in the Chilean mine since Aug. 5. For the record, you probably remember the very first words that Iribarren spoke to the world on Aug. 22.
“We are well,” he said through a communication line, “and we are hoping that you will rescue us.”
You probably missed it. You can be forgiven because I missed it too. But last Monday the Internet was all a twitter (yes, pun intended) about a birthday event. It’s one that your teeny-bopper kids (or grandkids) probably noticed. It appears that music heart-throb Justin Bieber celebrated his 16th birthday by visiting the Son of a Gun Tattoo and Barbershop in Toronto. There he had a tattoo of a seagull inked onto his left hip.
“That’s a bad area,” the tattoo artist told MTV News. “Justin was nervous, but then he got into it and it was done. It’s very tiny.”