Author: carin

the war on litter: notes from the front line

~ carin ~ 9 Comments

 

Actually, not so much notes as questions.

For instance…

All those festively coloured bags of doggie doo-doo you see on boulevards, sidewalks, parks, woodlands. Are dog walkers notoriously butter-fingered, i.e. are all those bags unknowingly dropped? Or have they been set down with the idea of being retrieved on the return trip (after all, who wants to carry crud AND a Timmy’s while strolling) and then forgotten when a different route home is decided upon? Or just forgotten. And those baggies all chubby with doo doo tied to fences or hanging from trees. What is that??  The result of someone coming along, finding a dropped bag and thinking: hmmm… let’s see what could be the best possible move here… oh, I know!  Or do the dog walkers themselves use the baggies as a sort of code among themselves? (If so, please let me in on it, because I’m an occasional dog walker myself.)

Also… people who enjoy a walk (with or without furry friends), who choose to ramble in the pristine beauty of a forest, conservation area or field of buttercups, the beach or any shoreline… and yet somehow find it normal to drop their drinking cups, cans, bottles and chip bags like breadcrumbs as they go. Why are you walking in pristine beauty when you obviously don’t like pristine beauty? Wouldn’t it make more sense for you to stretch your legs at the dump? Wouldn’t you feel more at home there??  Serious question.

And speaking of cups, cans and bottles. (And bags of doo doo for that matter.) Please don’t chuck them under trees. It just makes it harder for me to ferret them out. (FYI — they don’t magically become invisible under there)

Oh, and to the black Honda with tinted windows in front of me as I left the Bulk Barn the other day, whose passenger threw a plastic cup out the window while I watched, stunned:  I’m sorry I didn’t gather my moxie in time to put my car in Park, get out, knock on your tint and ask you in my best inquiring-minds-want-to-know voice, what the [redacted] is wrong with you. Again, serious question:  How messed up is your life that you have so little regard for the planet and what can we do to help you?

And here’s something I learned recently… cigarette butts take forever to decompose. In the meantime they clog and poison land and waterways and are often found inside fish. Yum!  But even if they didn’t do all that harm, chucking your smokes is very Honey Boo Boo.  Seriously, people who empty ashtrays on parking lots or throw butts out car windows or onto the street… please go live on another planet. Because, wouldn’t you like that, to be among all your like-minded friends, each of you knee deep in schmutz??**

Serious question.

** Of course more garbage cans and public ashtrays wouldn’t go amiss either.

Write letters, people! Ask for what’s needed.

♦

Read the story that goes with this pic, here.

From The Litter I See Project.

dear heather: quick question

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

 
 
Heather Stefanson
Minister of Justice and Attorney General
104 Legislative Building
450 Broadway
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3C 0V8

 
 
Dear Ms. Stefanson:

Given the strong assumption going in that Raymond Cormier was Tina Fontaine’s murderer, and the wisdom of our infallible judicial system determining that he is not, I’m wondering what happens next. How does the case proceed from here, what steps will be taken to find Tina’s murderer?

I’m assuming efforts will be ramped up asap, yes?

Because there is a killer. (As far as I know it’s not possible for a person to wrap themselves in a duvet, then cover themselves with rocks in a river. Especially with an alcohol level ‘slightly higher than is legal for driving’ and ‘traces of marijuana’. Even for a First Nations girl.)

Because she was a girl.

And I’ll be blunt— please ask yourself… just imagine for a moment that she was a white girl, let’s even give her blonde hair and blue eyes, let’s make her pageant quality in perfection of all those things that don’t actually matter (but somehow do), including pedigree. And there she is, in the river, in a duvet, covered in rocks. And let’s imagine some low life happens to have been hanging around her, has threatened some unsavoury actions, even admitted to killing her in off-handed ways. But… his DNA wasn’t found on the Costco duvet. And so the low life is innocent and the blonde girl is… what? What happens next? Do you see what I’m asking?

That’s it really. A simple question.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT IN ORDER TO FIND TINA FONTAINE’S KILLER?

Because surely this isn’t an insignificant case. Surely it will be a precedent of some kind, if only to illustrate how easily a wrongful arrest can be made. (How did that even happen??)

After all, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, teenager of excellent pedigree, a citizen of Manitoba, was murdered in Winnipeg. Her family are distraught. Lives beyond hers are shattered. Oh, wait.

Well, same thing, right? Justice will not be served until the killer has been found!  Right? Right??

On the bright side, justice has  been served for Raymond Cormier. Thank god an innocent like him was spared from undue punishment. Glory be to the Canadian justice system as it serves white men and blonde girls.

Thanking you in advance for what I have no doubt is your deepest and most pressing attention to this… what shall we call it… this ‘matter’?

Sincerely,

 

carin makuz.

p.s. If you aren’t the best qualified to answer this question, feel free to pass it along to someone who is. There must be someone who is…

 

 

 

a love pome for february

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

 
 
A street.
A side street off a main street.
A gravel driveway that curves left.
A mailbox, red flag down.
Bucolic, ordinary.
I notice it as I drive past at main street speed.
And in that split second

I remember you and me,
rows of strawberries,
laughing red fingered,
picking baskets of fruit,

early, early, early,

before the heat of another summer morning found us.

wordless wednesday (not always wordless)

~ carin ~ 6 Comments

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery

♥

And instead of chocolate, here’s one of my favourite posts…

https://matildamagtree.com/2014/02/14/todays-shape-3/

… proving #lovesweetlove is everywhere.
(If you find any pics to add to it… send them my way!)

Happy seeing-with-heart  day…

 

♦

Other (not always) wordless friends:

Cheryl Andrews
Allison Howard
Barbara Lambert
Allyson Latta
Elizabeth Yeoman

 

dear canada: we’re all taking notes

~ carin ~ 10 Comments

 
A lesson in the laws of this country:

It is, apparently, okay to fly into a rage when someone comes onto our property… perfectly okay to shout obscenities and smash the trespasser’s windshield with a hammer, kick in their tail lights while they are IN their vehicle and would very much like to be on their way at this point…

It is, apparently, okay to grab a gun, fire ‘warning’ shots (warnings of what? why warnings? whatever happened to that old chestnut: get off my lawn! )…

It is, apparently, okay to try to turn off the ignition of the trespasser’s car as they (once again) attempt to leave your property… and it is very okay, apparently, if the gun, still in your hand and now pointed at the trespasser’s head, goes off and kills them.

It’s okay because this is an accident. Because you said it was an accident.

Oops, you might say. You didn’t mean to kill them.

That, apparently, is enough for the courts in this land, enough to appease a jury of your peers (and by peers we obviously mean people as rage-filled and incompetent with a firearm as you are).

You didn’t mean to kill them.

What else is there to say? How to argue that point?

The laws of this country, apparently, condone hysteria, anger and violence toward trespassers. And errors where killing is concerned. Where pointing a loaded gun at someone’s head is concerned.

Oops.

But the laws of this country aren’t the people of this country and I hope the people of this country will stand up and make this travesty a catalyst for change.

Because none of this makes sense. That you, a man of 63, “didn’t mean to kill” but did kill  a 22 year old boy who, like every other boy, every other child that grows up in a place where there’s diddly squat to do sometimes gets up to bad business. Like you yourself might have done once upon a time. Because I’m guessing this isn’t the first time a young person went joy-riding on the prairies and made some dumb decisions. (Those decisions by the way, dumb as they may have been, were not in any way life-threatening… well, not to you anyway.) And, oh, by the way, we have dumb-ass decision makers in cities and towns too, young people who for whatever reason are bored and get into trouble… Do I understand the laws of this land to be that we have a new way of handling these situations? Because this sure as hell feels like a precedent.

(By the way… may I infer that the next time someone, oh, let’s say an Indigenous man, accidentally kills a white boy, by shooting him in the head, the court will appoint a jury of twelve members of the Indigenous community and try him in a fair trial with a jury of his peers? )

Because that would at least be something.

~

What also would be something is if the man who killed the boy was required to go to anger management counselling.

And some kind of night school program where he could learn how to use a gun properly, maybe get a copy of Side Arm Ownership for Dummies.

And if this country changed its rules about jury selection… as was suggested in a report dated 2013, by Judge Frank Iacobucci. who at that time said there was a “crisis in the justice system”.

Or wouldn’t it be something if the court had deemed it worthwhile that the man who killed the boy make a statement to the Boushie family, to ask for forgiveness, and to spend a weekend hearing about who Colten Boushie was, what his life was… to, oh I don’t know, develop a smidgen of compassion for another human being.

That still wouldn’t be justice, but it would be something.

 

 

this is not a review: ‘leaving my homeland — a refugee’s journey’

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

 

Kudos to Crabtree Publishing for their new ‘Leaving My Homeland’ series of picture book style books focusing on the refugee experience from the perspective of children. Each of the books covers one child’s story.

The series includes:

A Refugee’s Journey From Afghanistan

A Refugee’s Journey From Iraq

A Refugee’s Journey from Syria

(Also Myanmar, Colombia, Guatemala, Somalia, South Sudan, Congo, and Yemen)

Ten books in all.

Brilliantly done with photos and drawings and sidebars with bite-sized summaries of the country’s history, and current political situation, the children’s voices speaking about how they used to live before violence and fear took over, about what they loved and what they’ll miss. (The info is truly bite-sized, yet enough to come away with some basic knowledge of each country. Perfectly done for kids… and many adults could benefit from it too.)

Simple things explained, like the difference between refugees, immigrants and IDP’s (internationally displaced persons).

There are stories of journeys by boat, by air, and those on foot and how each of these journeys feels, the refugee camps they live in, sometimes for years, the people that help along the way and those who betray.

I especially love that these books for children don’t shy away from talk about Islamaphobia and why some people might be afraid of Muslims. They straighten out misconceptions and show children from these countries as simply children.

All of the stories are extraordinary to imagine, but despite the subject matter there is, amazingly, no drama. The books are not intended to shock or create sympathy, but merely to create a level of understanding of The Other.

For example, in A Refugee’s Journey from Myanmar,  by Ellen Rodger, the complicated history and present situation facing the Rohingyas is explained in simple and clear language that not only informs but will, hopefully, lead to questions and conversation.

There are stories about what happens when children go to their new schools, how they don’t fit in, don’t speak the language, but the focus is never on how that makes the child feel sad, or of being bullied or teased, though we know that happens, but instead, the mandate of the books seems to be… now that we know something of the situation these individuals have come from, the things they’re dealing with…. what can we do to help?

Imagine living in a country where fear is normal. You fear government soldiers, the police, and maybe even your next-door neighbour. You might be scared of being attacked if you leave your home. That is what life is like for some people….

Each book also includes a glossary and lists of websites and other excellent reading along the same lines, like Margriet Ruurs’ Stepping Stones and many others. This is really such brilliant, welcome and necessary reading for kids, and families together.

Books that matter. Can’t have too much of this.