Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2008

Another thought on “localism,” via CEOS for Cities post “Gas Prices Force Rethink of the Model”

Richard Florida has repeatedly asked “us” (society, policy makers, planners, ordinary citizens) to think of a way to make service industry jobs valuable on the same level as trade union jobs were valuable in the earlier twentieth century. Florida doesn’t put it quite like this, but I’m extrapolating that it means that in days gone by, trade union semi- or fully-skilled labor allowed people to aggregate socially and economically, allowed them to become a social and economic force to be reckoned with. They weren’t casual workers, and they — and their jobs — were not throw-away items. Florida, who recognizes that low-paying (low-value) service jobs are a fast-growing sector in the economy, wants to know how those jobs can be made as valuable for today — because (I would add) we simply can’t afford to have much of throw-away-anything these days, least of all throw away people. Creative economies, at any rate, can’t afford gratuitous waste or open loops, which leak goodness that should be recycled back into society.

As it happened, CEOs for Cities latest blog post, Gas Prices Force Rethink of the Model, really caught my attention specifically for what it could say to Florida’s question. Carol Colletta (of CEOs for Cities), who may be the blog post’s author, isn’t spilling the beans in terms of naming names, but check out the blog entry:

Which grocery store chain has lost 3000 employees in the past five months in one major U.S. city because they can no longer afford the gas to get there?

We’re not naming names, but we do know that said chain has “blown up” its future plans for greenfield expansion and is scrambling to reinvent itself as an urban chain.

We’re not sure exactly what that means yet (and neither are they), but it should be interesting to see if this is the first in a long line of retailers who try to reinvent themselves because their employees can’t afford to get to work. (And their customers will presumably be hard pressed to afford the drive.)

… Don’t know about you, but I see a convergence here. I see value coming from local employees, people who live where they work, and who don’t need to drive half an hour to reach their jobs — who in the best case scenario don’t need a car at all to get to work. I see the rising cost of fuel as forcing a change in the usual service-employee/ employer relationship.

You want to add value to the service worker dependent on lousy public transit to get to her job downtown? Make sure she doesn’t have to live so far away. And make sure she has reliable transit to boot. Want to see your local tourism industry hum along? Be a business that meets your employees needs in more ways than just incremental increases over the minimum wage. And so on. Rinse, and repeat.

If enough of that sort of thing happened, maybe a rethink and realignment of value in service sector jobs would have to fall into place. Because if it doesn’t, and it simply costs employees in service industry jobs too much to commute, the stores, hotels, and cafes will close and the employees will not be able to travel absurd distances to get to jobs they’re not particularly attached to in the first place.

Rising gas prices (and crummy public transit) might push for that rethink of how to add value to service sector jobs. And the answer might be: live, hire, and work as local as you can. But there’s no way anyone can expect service workers to shoulder that alone if housing in desirable and expensive places becomes too unaffordable while the cost of commuting to a low-paying job drives in the final nail.

Could “localism” help dilute “narcissism”?

Update, see end of post.

Ok, ok, I know it’s not a question I (or anyone) could possibly answer in a short blog post, but consider the discussions around the Emily Gould phenomenon (here, here, here, or a million other sites online). Fast Company’s Laura Palotie column, How Emily Gould Turns Us On, closes as follows:

…we like to equally spit on fictional New Yorker Carrie Bradshaw, traditional celebrity Denise Richards and the newest, self-made breed that Gould represents. We scarf down the private, aggravating realities of each with equal appetite, and let the resulting schadenfreude provide a soothing distraction from our own neuroses.

Well, um, maybe. Except that until someone in my Twitter stream tweeted about Gould’s NYT piece, blissfully ignorant me didn’t know who she was — except of course that I had heard of Gawker.

Yes, I did on one or two occasions glance at Gawker, but never really read it and certainly didn’t “follow” it. Why not? Because I don’t live in New York City. Call me naive, but I thought Gawker was all about New York — rather a long ways away from this (literally) “neck of the woods.”

And until reading Palotie’s piece, I didn’t know who Carrie Bradshaw was — I had to reread one sentence to understand that she doesn’t really exist and is in fact one of the characters on …um, a TV show? Something called Sex and the City?

Why would I not know who the Sex and the City characters are? Um, well, …I don’t watch TV. I have a TV (I have sex, too), but I have no access to TV channels (antennae don’t work in Victoria, and I refuse to pay money to the cable company). All I ever watch are DVDs — I don’t have a clue what’s on actual TV this season.

Instead, I know a lot about what’s going on in my local space — some of which overlaps with my online spaces. Not to sound too colloquial, but I’m totally about keeping my eye on the pulse of trends, seeing patterns emerge, knowing what’s coming up in terms of technological innovation. My interest lies in figuring out how that can apply to where I live, to the local.

Neither Carrie Bradshaw or Emily Gould have a locality in my world. Maybe that makes me sound backwards (or just really old) in pop cultural terms? Or perhaps if I were a psychiatrist, I might be interested in one or the other as an emblem for some sort of mental disorder; if I were a professional sociologist, I might be interested in one or the other as a specimen of forensic interest. But I’m not.

From what I recall of Emily Gould’s fantastic (and probably fantastically paid) 8,000 word ramble, there wasn’t anything that I could pattern-match in any useful sort of way to anything I’m interested in figuring out here.

Reading some of the commentaries on Gould, and the underlying assumptions they make that, exuding Schadenfreude, we must all be greedily “scarfing up” each breaking scandal, I can’t help but think that a passionate interest in your locale, in where you are, is a kind of vaccination against the narcissism that serves as a prerequisite to keeping the culture industry humming along.

Technology is making narcissism easier, but it would be wrong to blame technology just because it’s used by what appear to be the terminally narcissistic to amplify their ends. After all, that same technology is also making possible a renaissance of localism, enabling a community’s place-making voices to emerge from under the choke-hold of broadcast media.

It all depends on what you choose to focus on. Obviously, if you focus on the Goulds or the even more fictional Carrie Bradshaws, and you lose your place. Your life is where you make it.

Update, May 30, 7:30am: So, this is ironic… As it happens, I checked our local paper’s “Arts” section this morning — something I usually never do because this paper rarely reports on local arts happenings, instead typically filling this section with pop culture “news” I can easily pick up just about anywhere else. I don’t get why they (the paper) don’t get that I wouldn’t bother looking in my local paper for stuff I can read anywhere else. But I digress…: what did my bleary eyes see on the “local” paper’s “Arts” pages this cloudy a.m.? Not one, not two, not three, but four (4!) “stories” about …yup, you guessed it, Sex and the City. The movie and the TV show. And all of them, save one, were recycled filler from the feed of Canwest News Service. The one that wasn’t from that outlet was a cut and paste job of critics’ snippets cobbled together into an “article,” entitled”From the sublime to the ridiculous, the critics’ take on Sex and the City,” by “Special to the Times Colonist.” It’s enough to make you weep.

And some people think the bloggers are unprofessional or shallow or full of crap, and that those in official media are the professionals. Well, if that were true, one would have to rethink the whole notion of “professional.”

(Oops, my bad: I just now realized that I hadn’t actually included a link to Gould’s NYT piece, and just added it, above, and here.)

Vancouver Sun article: “Shelters turned away homeless 40,000 times in nine months”

Ok, tell me you don’t find this story by Vancouver Sun’s Frances Bula rather alarming: Shelters turned away homeless 40,000 times in nine months? I wonder if there’ll be follow-ups, and whether the count that people were turned away 40,000 times over a nine month period is accurate. If it is, then that’s proof that the Province isn’t doing nearly enough to get a handle on housing, housing affordability, addictions, mental health, and homelessness — not to mention on the portfolio of Children and Families. It seems that of those 40,000 times that people were turned away, it happened almost 16,000 times to women and children.

What a society… No federal housing policy in Canada, obviously nothing much on the Provincial level — and yet the Province is swimming in money, with new gas exploration licenses bringing in something on the order of half a billion dollars?

Look, the cities are bearing the brunt of this crisis. Memo to Province: fix it! Give the cities the tools, kick municipal leaders into action in the right way, do whatever is needed.

Victoria’s problems around homelessness are growing all the time, too — see Rob Randall’s blog entry on the proposed Ellice Street shelter relocation: authorities are telling the neighbours they expect the count of people who are homeless to decline in number. Well, I doubted that when I read it then, but in the wake of Bula’s article now, I really doubt it.

Persecuting smokers …and leaving everyone else to their own devices

There’s an editorial in today’s Times-Colonist, Persecuting smokers, which includes a reference to BC Provincial Health Officer Dr. Perry Kendall that has me scratching my head. 

The editorial is about the Lower Mainland municipality of White Rock’s plan to ban smoking in all outdoor public places by 2010.  This would include streets, parks, beaches: everywhere.  The editorial notes that this "looks more like a plan to persecute smokers than a strategy for protecting non-smokers."  Agree.  Dr. Kendall, meanwhile, is fully supportive of this plan. 

Why am I scratching my head?  I’m just not clear on why Dr. Kendall thinks that banning smoking in all public spaces (including streets, beaches, anywhere) would "’de-normalize smoking’ so that fewer youths are tempted to take up the habit," while at the same time Dr. Kendall also advocates in favor of freely dispensing needles to addicts (who promptly take their needle and shoot up openly on the street or in a park, incidentally also in full view of "youths") and handing out "crack kits" (pipes, mouth condoms) to addicts, who (again) then openly ingest these substances on the street.  There seems to be no concern over the social disorder on the street that results from the sort of half-way "harm reduction" that simply involves giving addicts the tools, leaving them to continue as before. 

I don’t smoke, although I used to smoke.  I loathe the smell of smoke and ashtrays.  But I think there’s something really sick about our increasingly blinkered society that we’ll go after smokers, while we hand the streets over to users (and pushers — oh, yes, so many pushers in Victoria) of hard drugs.  It’s as though the nanny state is in overload mode.  It can’t "solve" the drug issue, so it downloads it to the street (that’s us).  It can’t "solve" the problems of addiction and mental health (and resultant homelessness — and crime, typically property crime to support drug habits), so it downloads them to the street (that’s us).  But it can appear "forward-thinking" and "health-minded" when it comes to "us" (citizens, who unlike the chronically homeless, can still be fined — the latter are beyond fining), so downloads another nanny-esque ban on us.   We’re just supposed to hold still and take it, just as we’re supposed to hold still for all the other downloading.

The editorial disagrees with a ban on all outdoor/ public space smoking, and succeeds in making a critique of Kendall’s stance on smoking by pointing out that we ban the consumption of alcohol on the street, but "youths" still drink.  But it doesn’t make the connection that we have given up on controlling the use of hard drugs on our streets.  It suggests instead that: "Smokers are a dying breed. We shouldn’t be so hasty to take away what few places they have left to indulge their habits." 

Oh really?  First, show me that smokers are a dying breed, unless that’s meant literally of course.  And second, is this "time will take care of it" attitude what’s letting our streets go to hell with regard to hard drugs? 

Connect the dots: two articles by Miro Cernetig and Bob Ransford that should be read together

The Vancouver Sun published two articles, nearly back-to-back, which make a lot of sense when read in conjunction: on March 22, we read Bob Ransford’s As cities become more complex, our taxes keep rising and on March 24 we read Milo Cernetig’s Approach to social woes a moral failure by all three main B.C. parties.

These two articles have to be comprehended together. One (Ransford’s) wants people to understand the economics of taxation that underlie municipal finance, while the other (Cernetig’s) wants people to understand how a certain kind of underfunding has produced the horrible social problems we see in our (BC) cities today. Cernetig references Vancouver, but Victoria has similar problems.

I have for some months now picked up on the criticisms of municipal infrastructure funding in Canada — even going so far as to publish a short piece on Vibrant Victoria on Dec.3/07, Victoria’s Choice: to be or not to be …is not the question. The gist of Ransford’s article elaborates on the theme I also addressed in my piece: cities (in my opinion, Canadian cities especially, although Ransford argues that it’s a Western/ First World global problem) are too dependent on single sources of income, primarily property taxes, while so-called senior levels of government (state or provincial, and federal) receive funding from many diverse sources of income: consumption taxes, income taxes, and so on. At the same time, cities are in the front line of having to provide services on every level.

This is lunacy, especially when you take into account the fact that cities generate most of a nation’s economic activity and wealth, and that they also will typically attract the largest populations of people dependent on what is collectively referred to as “services”: supported housing, addiction treatment, food banks, welfare, etc. Poor people come to cities because this is where the services are. Very often, they are in a city’s downtown, which is why you’ll find neighbourhoods in downtowns that become magnets for the visibly needy.

The problem is that these services are underfunded or even non-existent, some having once been funded by one of the two senior levels of government, but now having been off- or downloaded to municipalities.

And there we are, connecting the dots.

The Feds “downloaded” to the Provinces those services that used to be Federally-funded. The Provinces in turn have downloaded Provincially-funded services to the municipalities.

And, …well, the municipalities have no one to download to …except us. And that, in a nutshell, is my argument: citizens — people who live in cities — are shouldering the downloaded costs of all the stuff that all the other levels of government, including the municipalities, used to handle. Beggars on the streets; addicts shooting up in broad daylight; mentally ill people freaking out on corners; homeless people in every nook and cranny of public and private spaces; human feces on the sidewalks and in doorways; used needles in parks and on sidewalks; drug deals transacted openly on downtown streets… The list goes on.

The police refer to the mentally ill who openly use illegal drugs and defecate on the street and sleep in doorways as their “clients.” It seems to have gone by the board that the police shouldn’t be dealing with people on that end of the spectrum of social disorder in the first place — the police should be dealing with criminals and with law enforcement. When the people on that end of the spectrum engage in criminal activity — and they do, because they steal to stay alive and to feed their addictions — the police act like social workers …because that’s the role that has been downloaded to them, too.

Criminals exploit this.

My neighbours, who came home at 11pm on a recent weekend night to find that their basement door had been kicked in by thieves while they were away, thieves who robbed them of various items and who apparently fled just as the family returned home, had to wait for over 12 hours before the police could come over. And why was that? Perhaps they were too busy taking care of “clients”…

We — citizens — are the bottom of the food chain in this story. We — citizens — are the last link to off- or download to. We — citizens — are supposed to feel guilty if we don’t express or display the appropriate level of compassion toward the marginalized. But the citizen might ask herself, “Whatever happened to the idea that I pay my taxes, and that they pay for services intended to ameliorate these conditions?” The citizen still pays her taxes — and pays and pays and pays, if she lives in Canada — and the senior levels of government boast of surpluses. The municipalities, meanwhile, relying almost solely on the property taxes she and the many other citizens in the urban area pay, find themselves shouldering the cost of upgrading ancient infrastructure (sewage, roads, parks, recreation centres, etc.), plus the cost of “helping” the growing pool of service seekers.

But there are no provincial mental hospitals anymore, there is no affordable housing or supportive housing being built by the province or the feds, and all the damage that accrues from this out-casting has been downloaded to Joe and Jane Schmuck, i.e., you and me Citizen Jim and Citizen Jill.

That’s the dot.

Let me just present a couple of extract from the above-mentioned articles. Here’s Ransford:

Am I getting value for dollar for the property taxes I pay to local government? Politicians and bureaucrats at city hall would argue that I am getting more for my dollar than I ever have. Despite the fact that the number of employees at my city hall has grown faster than the rate of local population growth, the people that work there will tell you they are doing much more with fewer resources.

The fact is that cities across the country have become much more complex organizations than they were in the past and they have taken on more and more responsibilities. The federal and provincial governments have downloaded a long list of responsibilities on municipal governments. They have also stopped doing things that they once did as governments and the municipalities have stepped in and taken over where a need had to be met.

Social or non-market housing is a good example. Providing housing for the truly needy used to be almost the sole responsibility of the federal government. They started backing out of this area in the late 1980s and have next to no involvement today in funding what most are identifying is a desperate social need in our urban centres
(…)

The role of municipal governments has evolved. No longer do you look to your municipality merely to fix the potholes in the road in front of your house or to build and maintain the pipes that dispose of the sewage when you flush your toilet..

As Ransford points out (on page 2 of the article), a key problem here is aging populations:

The concept of a tax tied to the value of your home is beginning to make less practical sense with an aging urban population that will soon be dominated by retirees on fixed retirement incomes with all of their equity tied up in relatively expensive homes.

There’s only one kind of civic taxpayer and one source of civic revenue. There is a looming danger that taxpayer will soon no longer be able to fund the full cost of what it takes to run a city.

I would further add to Ransford’s excellent summing-up that Victoria’s troubles are uniquely compounded by our balkanized political system, which splits Victoria into many separate un-amalgamated municipalities (the Capital Regional District, which is all of Victoria, is 13 municipalities, each with its own mayor and council, fire chief, police department, and so on). At the same time, the City of Victoria holds the region’s downtown, the place where everyone comes for services — social services that range from food banks, charities, needle “exchanges,” and plain old week-end partying — many of which require policing and various levels of clean-up. Who pays? The City of Victoria, not the surrounding municipalities, which merely take advantage of what the City offers.

Let’s look at Milo Cernetig’s article now. He gets a gold star (in my book) for slamming all the BC provincial parties — too often and for too long, the problems we’re facing have been presented in partisan terms: it’s the BC Liberals’ fault (note to non-BC readers: the BC Liberals are sort of neo-conservative, and have little in common with the Federal Liberals); or it’s the NDP’s fault, and so on. Yadda yadda yadda. Blah blah blah.

Forget about it. That partisan shit has to stop, because it’s obvious that none of the parties have covered themselves in glory here, and that whole partisan shtick is old beyond words.

Here are some excerpts from Cernetig’s piece:

…here’s the fast-rewind of the amazing arc of policy blunders — given to us by a melange of Social Credit, New Democratic and Liberal governments — that I tried to explain.

First, imagine progressively shrinking the province’s major psychiatric hospital, Riverview, to save money. Then, in a cruel twist, offer no safe harbour for many of those psychiatric patients, who politicians told us would benefit from being “deinstitutionalized” and put back into society.

Instead, let large numbers of these truly desperate souls fend for themselves on our streets. Let them line up for a room in those bedbug-infested flophouses our health inspectors, for reasons that mystify, somehow allow to stay open. While we’re at it, we’ll also slow down the construction of new social housing, too, since it’s too expensive.

(…)
So now we’ve got all these lost souls begging and wandering the city’s downtown, often in a schizophrenic or crystal meth haze.

But we really haven’t done much about it. We’re not good at the tough job of distinguishing between vagrants (who should be moved on by the cops), or chronic criminals (who should be put in jail by judges) and the truly sick (who should be taken to shelters or hospitals by good beat cops, if we had enough of them).

Nope. We somehow got used to the sight of people sprawled on sidewalks and inside the doorways of the world’s “most livable” city.

There it is: another dot: We somehow got used to the sight of people sprawled on sidewalks and inside the doorways of the world’s “most livable” city.

The “somehow” in that sentence is “downloading.” We have been worn down by senior levels of government absenting themselves from the business of governing (a big piece of which includes providing services in exchange for all the money we fork over), and in the British tradition (within which we exist here), we have taken it uncomplainingly up the rear end, “muddling through” and accepting it all as if it were an inevitability.

That’s why we put up with the sight of what Cernetig describes, put up with open drug use, criminal transactions in plain daylight, and lunatics on our streets. In the British tradition, we are, after all, but subjects of these governments, not its master. Just as every level has downloaded — until there’s no one left to download to except to you and me, so every level absolves itself of accountability, because of course there’s always a higher level to defer to. In the last instance, the senior levels can defer to “the Crown,” a cruel joke referencing Canadian impotence.

The emancipation of Canadian cities is a project so inextricably tied to emancipation from old ways of tutelage and subjugation that it will amount to a revolution if it is ever to happen.

Unfortunately, since there has never been a Canadian revolution, I don’t hold out much hope for the emancipation / empowerment of Canadian cities. Perhaps — counter to my current pessimism — we’ll eventually strike some sort of paternalistic bargain with the “higher” levels of government after all. Since they hold the power already, they might grok the problem and step up, if only to maintain their hold.

At this point, I almost don’t care as long as the downloading stops.

Photograph by Ian Lindsay, from Milo Cernetig’s article.

The caption reads “A homeless person sleeps on a Cordova Street sidewalk in February. Figures show that investing in social housing would save B.C. $211 million annually.”

Is “balance” enough?

Just a quick post, as I’m still in catch-up mode. This morning I read an article in the local paper about a man who has 250 charges against him for public drunkenness, causing disturbances, aggressive panhandling, harassing people, and so on. “Red,” as he’s called in the article, is not homeless, according to police, and they do not believe that he has a mental health problem (although that’s debatable, given his behavior). See Persistent panhandler gets summons under a section of community charter.

Now the city will use a new community charter bylaw to haul this individual before court, where they hope the judge will sentence him to stay away from the downtown core. The intent is to ban Red from panhandling and from “socializing” downtown.

One city council member, quoted in the article, says, “There’s always got to be a balanced approach in dealing with all the issues.”

This bothers me, maybe because we hear too much about “balance” these days. The councilor is concerned that Red’s rights to be downtown on the street to panhandle (which isn’t illegal as such) aren’t infringed upon, and that the way to address the problems caused by the behaviors of people like Red is to seek balance. It somehow makes me think that balance is starting to become a sort of mantra which doesn’t allow valuation. And if that’s the case, you have to ask: Is “balance” stasis? If so, it’s death.

What about judgement? Are we (especially in Canada) so afraid of judging (as my daughter pointed out to me a couple of years ago, in Canada judges need to take workshops to learn how to be non-judgemental…) that we opt for balance (stasis), versus embracing quick, nimble, intellectually aware and alert change? And besides, isn’t our supposed balance often enough just an appearance of balance? All sorts of stuff is still out of whack beneath the surface and in other domains, and the fervent wish for balance is …well, just a wish. Perhaps a wish to get out of making judgements and decisions?

It’s ironic that the US should be full of religious evangelists, whose mantra on the Christian side of the register is not to judge, lest ye be judged, and yet it’s we in Canada, supposedly secular, who are holier than thou in being non-judgemental.

So here’s the deal: I have a problem with being non-judgemental, especially since I’m not a Christian or religious. Being non-judgemental might work fine in your spiritual life, but it sucks when it comes to ethics and politics and economics and policy. You know, it’s like that old shibboleth about rendering unto Caesar what’s Caesar’s and onto god what’s god’s.

Which finally makes me wonder if politicians, when they talk about “seeking balance,” are refusing to judge, …which makes me wonder whether focusing on “balance” is replacing decision-making. I also wonder whether balance in the spiritual sense was ever intended to be a sort of placeholder for anything, whether painful or pleasurable.

As an atheist, I object to any strategy or philosophy that introduces religion into politics. When people talk about “balance,” they usually mean something quasi-religious (or at least “spiritual,” whatever that horse of a different color means to all the riders out there).  Whether the councilor in question is religious or not is moot for me at this point.  I’m concerned with the discourse of “balance,” which is starting to sound like religion.  I object to religion whenever and wherever it worms its way into places where it doesn’t belong.

Daily Diigo Public Link 01/29/2008

Boogie: Bleak Street Lifes (PingMag - The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things”) Annotated

tags: boogie, brooklyn, drug_addiction, gangs, interview, nyc, photography, ping_mag, street_life

Interview with “Serbian photographer Boogie [who] grew up in the war-torn region of former Yugoslavia, documenting protests and the disturbing portraits of skinheads. After moving from Belgrade to Brooklyn in 1998, he started observing New York’s bleak street side of life with monochrome shots. Distinctively, his work isn’t emphatic. He doesn’t judge. He is more reporting on a not so distant universe with a fine eye for detail - and a lot of guts. He showed PingMag his depiction of Brooklyn gang life and junkies.” Boogie notes: “‘This whole life is a bunch of choices you make and they just made a couple of wrong ones,’ says photographer Boogie about his series on junkies in Brooklyn.”

About consequences

A slight departure from matters of urbanism, if you will.

When the spouse & I became a parents, we were compelled to re-examine all sorts of ideological beliefs, opting instead for principles and for what works (vs. principles and what we’d like to have work, or should work, or would be nice if it worked… etc.). I realize this makes us sound like perfect jerks, but that’s what biology will do to a body. The spouse even took a parenting workshop called “Redirecting your child’s behavior,” which at its core was all about natural consequences and how to implement them.

I sometimes joke that I’m a “permissive parent,” but that’s just a way of differentiating myself from a mainstream that seems to me increasingly suspect: I’m not permissive, because for starters I don’t believe that I’m in control of everything, which leads to two fundamental insights. First, I do not tolerate being treated like a doormat or made responsible for things beyond my control. Second, that first insight lends focus to the things I can control, including not overprotecting my kids from natural consequences. I permit natural consequences to take place. I have discovered that this is becoming a rare principle in the increasingly professionalized world of managed parenting.

Let’s take that as a sort of preamble to this: an editorial in our daily newspaper, which prompted me to write a letter to the editor (which actually got published, with relatively minor editing). First, the editorial:

Freedom rests on responsibility
Times Colonist

Sunday, January 13, 2008
We pride ourselves on being a tolerant and liberated society. And certainly we enjoy a degree of freedom unknown in earlier times. But has our sense of personal latitude come too far?Let’s start with the notion of a responsible adult. Increasingly, it’s hard to find anyone, at least in public life, who fills that description. In government, senior officials used to resign if errors were committed on their watch. Now we have buck-passing and displays of contrition. In the last few months, there have been three major events where resignations would once have been likely.

There was the Taser incident at Vancouver airport, in which Polish passenger Robert Dziekanski died. The RCMP inflicted more harm on Canada’s international image in a few minutes than anyone has caused in decades. But no one has stepped forward to shoulder the blame.

Then came the admission by Premier Gordon Campbell that the Vancouver convention centre is massively over budget. No minister has accepted responsibility.

On the heels of those two blunders came the medical isotopes fiasco. In November the Chalk River nuclear reactor in Ontario closed after failing to meet licensing standards. The plant produces two-thirds of the world’s supply of radioactive materials for medical imaging. Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. gave no warning of the shutdown. Hospitals around the globe were scrambling and the affair blackened Canada’s other eye. Yet the minister in charge, Saanich-Gulf Islands MP Gary Lunn, has not accepted responsibility. Instead, he’s threatening to fire the nuclear regulator.

It’s not just in politics that personal responsibility is becoming a rarity. In sports, serious doping allegations have been made against some of the best-known athletes. None have left the game and fans still turn out in record numbers. In the celebrity world, scarcely a week goes by without some outrageous antics. But a few days in rehab clinic, a talk-show apology and all is forgiven.

Even in the workplace, employees are excused for egregious misconduct. Here in Victoria, a few members of the Liquor Distribution Branch staff became falling-down drunk at a Government House ceremony. One had to crawl up the stairs to receive his award; another tried to steal the cutlery; and a third heckled then Lt.-Gov. Iona Campagnolo. But no one lost his job.

While we’re increasingly unwilling to accept responsibility for our own actions, we’re quick to force our sensitivities on other people’s ideas. Four students at Ontario’s Osgoode Hall law school have launched a complaint against Maclean’s. They charge that an article in the magazine was offensive to Muslims. Three human rights commissions across the country, including B.C.’s, have agreed to hear this complaint. A plainer attack on freedom of speech would be hard to imagine. The magazine must now hire lawyers and defend itself in three separate tribunals.

In 2006, when the Calgary-based Western Standard printed cartoons that had provoked outrage in Denmark, it was summoned before the Alberta Human Rights Commission.

Many Canadian universities have adopted harassment policies that impose sweeping limitations on freedom of speech. The University of British Columbia, for example, prohibits statements of opinion that “burden” anyone on the basis of “age, race, colour, ancestry, place of origin, political belief, religion, marital status, family status, physical or mental disability, sex, sexual orientation, and unrelated criminal convictions.” The “burdening” doesn’t even have to be intentional.

Civic life requires responsibility. Hiding from it, or waiting for someone else to impose it, is self-indulgent. So is turning a difference of opinion into a legal confrontation.

When the complaint was filed against Maclean’s, civil libertarians who had pressed for the appointment of human rights commissions were aghast. “During the years when my colleagues and I were labouring to create such commissions, we never imagined that they might ultimately be used against freedom of speech,” said Alan Borovoy, who was general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

We need to restore some measure of self-restraint, personal responsibility and accountability in our daily lives.

© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2008

Next, my letter to the editor, in response:

Use your judgment and think critically
Times Colonist

Published: Monday, January 21, 2008

Re: “Freedom rests on responsibility,” Jan. 13.

Thank you for an important, thought-provoking editorial. To understand why Canadians can get away with “buck-passing and displays of contrition,” look at how you or your neighbours raise children. If there are no natural consequences for bad behaviour, and missteps are ignored because criticism allegedly inhibits “self-esteem,” is it any wonder that personal responsibility shrivels or that narcissism is normal?

The 30-something Cobble Hill real-estate agent currently facing charges in Colorado for drunkenness and sexual harassment on a plane would probably have avoided the prospect of a $500,000 fine and years in prison had he learned earlier there are significant consequences for gross misbehaviour.

Why should union officials or people in government take responsibility when it’s easy to avoid consequences, provided you say the right words of contrition, versus going to jail or paying biting fines?

If you substitute groupthink for consequences, you’ll dig an even deeper hole, which the example of Maclean’s being charged for offensiveness to Muslims illustrates well. Robert Latimer isn’t “contrite,” so the Orwellian parole board denies him parole (as if he would ever reoffend by murdering another’s daughter). But drunk drivers who kill cyclists practically walk away unpunished. Why? Their “displays of contrition” appease the thought police.

Collectively, our obligation to be “non-judgmental” overrides critical thinking. The latter is a far bigger human right and duty than not offending anyone or mouthing mealy words of contrition.

My only gripe is that the paper edited my second to last sentence, which read “Collectively, we are dumbing ourselves down into sheep whose obligation to be ‘non-judgmental’ overrides critical thinking,” and the edited version fails to convey that meaning.

Hand-made links (for a change)

Why is it that some of the most salient material presents itself — and in the greatest quantities — when one already has a mountain of mental meal on one’s plate, with nary a cranial cranny remaining into which the new material may be stuffed?

I’m at the point where even bookmarking to Diigo isn’t good enough, because I can’t summon the energy to write a cogent annotation!

Therefore, in no particular order, some links of prime importance (in my world, anyway):
Regine at We Make Money Not Art posts two entries (Part I and Part II) on the DLD (Digital, Life, Design) conference held last month in Munich. Not only that, she includes specific references to other bloggers (Ulrike Reinhard, for example) who have posted more information (more than what’s already on DLD’s websites? Muss das sein?! …sigh…) and projects (like 192021) that I definitely need to follow up.

Part II includes way too much stuff for me to process right now — just this little picture/ diagram from one of the pages she references has me spinning:

Alert, alert: I’m thinking local local local, which starts to sound like “loco loco loco” after a while….

…Gawd, and don’t even get me started on Regine’s references to Patrick Schumacher (just a taste from WMMNA:

Patrik Schumacher mentioned that the challenge today for architects is to be able to comprehend and reflect in their work the increase in society complexity. Order and lack of complexity bring disorientation. A quick look at the way urban areas were built in the 50s brought us makes the case clearer.

“Order and lack of complexity bring disorientation.” Vraiment! It’s fatal to confuse order with “un-complex” organization. What our brains want is “ordered complexity” or “complex order,” which appeals to every person’s innate sense of pattern recognition (which, pace, is more than only “a subtopic of machine learning”).

…All this, and I haven’t even touched on several entries that rocked my world yesterday — outside.in’s announcement of a brilliant win-win deal with the Washington Post, or their VC’s most interesting blog post, Rethinking The Local Paper…

…All this, and this being the mere tip of the iceberg. Let’s not forget the links my husband sends — he tells me I have to watch Paulo Coelho (brilliant, from what I’ve heard, absolutely paradigm shifting) as well as Edward Tufte (ditto), and more… My inbox is overflowing…