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Football memories: Who were we? Bulldogs!

September 3, 2010

Since my return to Edmonton, I’ve started reading the Calgary Herald as I walk home from work.

Herald photo (Bernie Morrison at right).

It may be an odd habit and an even odder sight (as I narrowly dodge a lamp post). But I grew up devouring the sports section of the Journal’s sister paper and never stopped cheering for the Flames and the Stamps. And there’s a convenient stack of papers on the way out of the newsroom.

This week, I was reading about the Stamps when I saw a picture of former linebacker Bernie Morrison. The Stamps are honouring Mr. Morrison, placing him on the ‘Wall of Fame’ along with Alondra and Will Johnson.

Bernie Morrison was one of a few ex-Stampeders who would come to NW Calgary’s Sir Winston Churchill high school each day to coach the junior football team in the mid-90s. Morrison coached linebackers, while our D-Line coach was the gentlemanly John Helton, another Stampeder Wall-of-Famer and #12 on TSN’s Top 50 CFL Players of all time.

Back then, I was an extremely shy 140 pound kid who liked playing sports. When I entered into high school, my friends and I decided to try out for football.

“You’ll never make it,” said my big brother. Thanks for that, bro.

I showed up on the first day wearing soccer cleats instead of football shoes. When I picked my helmet, I took an old one with a long grill — the old punters helmet (bad choice). I figured it would just be fun to see how I stacked up against others. Astonishingly, cut after cut, I managed to make the team, though most of my friends didn’t. I’m not judging the coaching staff, but they actually let me start at outside linebacker.

My memories of Bernie Morrison were of a guy who’d show up to practice about half an hour late — as soon as he could after work (in real estate?). Of the linebacker coaches, he was the good cop who gave us motivational speeches. Our other linebacker coach was the bad cop who would grab my face mask, cock an eye at me, and yell, “Contain, Witt, contain!!”

I don’t remember too much of Morrison. He was an impeccable dresser with massive arms. He didn’t say much to us individually, but would teach us the finer points of the game. In particular, I remember him teaching us techniques to ‘swim’ past the O-line.

I also remember one of the speeches he gave right before one of our playoff games. It went something like this:

“We need to get mean. Go out tonight and take a walk. Think about the game. Kick a dog if you have to. And if that doesn’t work, squeeze your left nut!”

It was fun to be part of something, but I never had the killer instinct to get mean. I certainly never kicked any dogs (or squeezed anything). I learned a lesson about football: I’m not that guy. And I think my coaches figured that out as well.

But looking back, I’m really thankful I got to play. It was great exercise — besides rugby and soccer, I have never run so much in my life. I was glad to be a part of something as a fledgling high school kid. It meant that despite my shyness, despite my reservations, I could actually contribute in a small way. And I could hold my head up as I walked through the halls.

So here’s a big thanks to Bernie Morrison, one of those coaches who took a couple of hours each day (five days a week for 3 months!) to teach some kids the game.

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Louie: An appreciation

August 28, 2010

Since I entered this world, I have been a fan of television.

To paraphrase the immortal words of Alan Thicke, I’d take the good, I’d take the bad, I’d take them both, and what have you. There was nothing I wouldn’t watch: CBC’s The Edison Twins, Sledge Hammer, Kid Street, ALF (both live action and cartoon form). I even remember the show before Degrassi TNG, before Degrassi High, even before Degrassi Jr. High — Degrassi Street. Awful, awful stuff.

But somewhere along the way, I lost my connection with the old cathode ray tube. I grew up a little, or so I thought, putting aside childish televised amusement for books and social activities. I became one of those ‘I don’t even own a TV’ guys, though I wasn’t the obnoxious kind that advertises it loudly.

I blame TV too. TV didn’t hold up its end of the bargain: The Simpsons stopped being funny. The fourth wall of Larry Sanders and the Newsroom came tumbling down. Futurama was cancelled, and I was left with virtually nothing worth watching.

But something has recently happened. TV came back.

Witness comedian Louie C.K.’s brilliant anti-comedy, Louie. And no, it’s not to be mistaken for Lucky Louie, his slightly unfortunate short lived sitcom. Louie is kind of like Seinfeld, if Seinfeld was on HBO and in desperate need of anti-depressants. Or if Curb Your Enthusiasm mated with the Sarah Silverman Program.

In this clip, Louie is cast against his will in a remake of the Godfather, starring and directed by Matthew Broderick:

That’s pretty much the only clip I can screen in good conscience on this site. And if that clip doesn’t scare or mystify you, you should check it out.

Louie is the best comedy show I’ve seen in ages. It’s dark. It’s edgy. It’s entirely uncomfortable. It’s decidedly not family viewing. But man, is it good television.

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On guns and numbers

August 20, 2010

Sometimes stories don’t make it into the papers. For good reasons.

Photo by Akash_Kurdekar (flickr cc)

Earlier this week, I worked on a story about the gun registry. We received an interesting news release touting an Edmonton police officer whose informal survey showed that 92 per cent of police officers don’t support the registry, running counter to virtually all official policing organizations in the country.

My interview with the officer was enjoyable: a super friendly cop with lots of policing experience (11 years patrolling + 11 years in criminal investigations) and an opinion on gun registration. He acknowledged other perspectives and offered no conspiracy theories. The only problem was his survey — it more closely resembled an online poll than it did representative data. While working on the story mid-afternoon, I was unable to get a voice adequately countering his perspective. We ultimately decided not to run the story, though I thought it might deserve a place here.

********

Late last spring, Edmonton police Const. Randy Kuntz decided to test a hunch.

Kuntz, a former patrolling officer who now works in criminal investigations at Edmonton’s southwest division, wondered about how many police officers supported gun registration.

Photo by Colchu (flickr cc)

Kuntz only expected 200 replied, but gathered 2,631 responses from every province and territory in Canada over a fourteen-month period. Roughly 92 per cent – 2,410 – of respondents responded negatively.

Kuntz admits the results are less than rigorous, but says the results match his policing experience.

“It’s about as unscientific as one can get,” said Kuntz. “But pretty soon it started looking like a lot of guys don’t agree with the system, which is contradictory to what the association of chiefs of police are saying.”

The survey results come in the midst of a political debate over the effectiveness of the long-gun registry. On Wednesday, RCMP Chief Supt. Marty Cheliak, a vocal supporter of the registry, was replaced and placed on leave from the national police force. The move to replace Cheliak has drawn widespread criticism, coming just a few weeks before Parliament is set to debate a Conservative private member’s bill to scrap it.

Cheliak was actually slated to appear in Edmonton on Monday at the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police Conference as one of three presenters on a national firearms strategy. While the session will still take place, Cheliak won’t be there.

The embattled long-gun registry has received overwhelming support from the policing community, including the chiefs of police, the  Canadian Police Association, and the Canadian Association of Police Boards. A joint statement by the organizations released in May notes the database costs only $4.1 million to operate and helps police in investigations and court proceedings. The registry was accessed over four million times last year.

For Kuntz, the timing of the survey results is not so much about the politics but about the effectiveness of the registry on the pavement. Kuntz’s beef is that the registry doesn’t account for the actual location of weapons. A registered gun owner, he says, can legally lend his weapon to anyone with a valid license for the firearm.

Kuntz has only accessed the registry once in his entire career, when someone wanted to donate a gun, and worries about young officers might might gain a false sense of security from the database.

“As far of the actual use it gets, it’s kind of useless,” said Kuntz. “It’s kind of like the TV channel around Christmas where they show burning logs in the fire.”

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Clark Pinnock (1937-2010)

August 18, 2010

Long before my days as a journalist, I was a student of theology. In retrospect, it was partly due to growing up in an evangelical Baptist home, and partly because of my need to understand how thinking works. It’s often intuitive and often counter-intuitive.

Theology — talk about God — is a demanding intellectual discipline, requiring philosophical acumen, interpretive rigour, historical precision, and an insatiable curiosity to probe some of the greatest minds in history. It is also an exciting set of questions: Who is God? What is the meaning of meaning? How do you think faithfully?

Theology is also a discipline that teaches about patterns of thought. Your future shapes your present. Your understanding of God affects your humanity. Your place in the world determines your way of interpreting that world. Salvation is inseparable from your actions, and vice versa (for it all). It’s all interconnected, a web and a matrix. Theology gives you a sense of the beauty of thought, and how the questions you ask have been asked before and will be asked again.

In those days, I cast about for intellectual role models who were faithful to the tradition that I loved and that shaped me, yet who exemplified curiosity and a willingness to change.

Clark Pinnock died from a heart attack on Sunday. He was probably the most important theologian to hail from Canada since Bernard Lonergan. Pinnock was an intellectual pilgrim. Raised a liberal, he became an evangelical. Becoming a Calvinist, he morphed into an Arminian. He was a truly open soul, entering into dialogue with all kinds of thought and all kinds of people. His name was also anathema in many places.

I never actually met Pinnock, but his books were lovely. Flame of Love, Pinnock’s theology of the Holy Spirit, is prayerful and heartfelt. Tracking the Maze, Pinnock’s exploration of the future of modern theology, was irenic and balanced. And The Openness of God pushed boundaries.

Close friends of mine at Regent College took his summer school class in 2002 and spoke of his kindness, as well as his distracting habit of making some sort of clicking noise while deep in thought. Sadly, that was just before the final chapter of his life, marked by the long, dark descent into Alzheimer’s.

Requiescat In Pace

Maranatha

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Anne Rice and J-Roc

August 13, 2010

I just heard Anne Rice being interviewed on CBC’s Q with guest host Jonathan Torrens (of Street Cents fame).

If you hadn’t heard, Rice recently updated her facebook status to say, “In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian.”

It’s an interesting statement for a lot of reasons: not only because Rice is a public figure who has now had a very public conversion and un-conversion, but because she left Christianity ‘in the name of Christ.’

Rice maintains she still prays and reads the Bible, believes in God and the divinity of Jesus. She’s just uncomfortable with a lot of political goings-on within the Catholic Church. She says she had to leave for the sake of her personal integrity. Rice is especially livid about Christian opposition to gay marriage; it’s a smokescreen, she says, for the fact that Christians won’t face the fact that there are a lot of highly moral homosexuals (and various other people) out there. She found herself cringing whenever the Church took a political stance.

And while Rice sounds overwhelmingly Protestant (almost positively glowingly pietistic, apart from the gay marriage part), she clearly isn’t about to head down to join the local Moravian Brethren. She’s going solo.

It’s a fascinating place for a person to end up. Many will say Rice can’t have her cake and eat it too. But she’s undoubtedly done a lot of personal reflection and has her reasons.

Listen to Torren’s interview, however, and you’ll sense a hint of glee and triumph in his voice not suited for this interview. It’s as if he hasn’t considered the underlying biographical question: what would compel someone to come to Christianity in the first place?

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On Horse Stories

August 5, 2010

Early in my oh-so-young journalism career, I learned a very valuable lesson: animal stories are dynamite.

I first met Pearl about an hour before her surgery.

My earliest realization of this nugget came during an internship at the Edmonton Journal in Christmas 2008. A pair of abandoned horses were found buried in snow near Renshaw mountain (west of Jasper), and a group of local volunteers from McBride, BC, worked tirelessly to free the animals.

The story had a happy ending. The horses were adopted and recently walked in McBride’s town parade. And I got an amazing clipping: an exclusive interview with the Edmonton lawyer who had left the animals during a fall trip.

That story has been with me ever since. A large number of visitors still come to my website looking for information about the case. It’s also given me a glimmer of recognition during job interviews. And one of these days, I’ll get out there and meet Belle, Sundance, and a few of the people I talked to that Christmas.

I also jump at the chance to write about animals: the passion they inspire, their connection with their owners, and how a simple story about an animal tells a lot about a community.

I’ve recently become the Journal’s crime reporter, meaning I rarely get to tackle animal stories anymore. Last week, however, I was handed another horse story. It was a fascinating one.

Pearl is a 8- or 9-year-old mare that was rescued last winter from neglected and dire conditions at a ranch near Carrot Creek. She was placed with Sherwood Park’s Rescue 100 Horses Foundation, a group that takes on horses seized by Alberta SPCA.

Pearl had a large hole in her face. We’re not sure how she got it, but the hole was substantial. You could look right into her sinus. And the group responsible for taking Pearl in and nursing her back to health raised money for surgery to fix her face.

I went out last Friday to see Pearl get the surgery to fix the wound. The day was fascinating – I had no idea what horse surgery looks like – but it’s an amazing thing. Since there was little to do but watch what was going on, I ended up shooting a video of the preparation and earliest parts of the surgery with my Canon G11 camera.


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The 1,000 Mile Marriage (Part 3 of 3)

July 27, 2010

This is part 3 of a 3 part feature article I wrote last fall for a class with David Beers. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.

Technology is no panacea for a commuting-crazy culture.

Every techno-advancement comes with utopian promises. Skype, a Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) service used for video phone calls, pledges to “set your conversations free,” or at least nearly. The main page of their website features a man and a woman embracing at an airport – they’re connected, see – and all for the low price of mere bandwidth.

But technology also pushes people apart. A high-tech global economy means increased job specialization. Just like going 150 kilometres for a perfect match in love, workers go farther to find a perfect match with an employer. The trouble happens when getting down to trying to balance it all.

Photo by Austrini (Flickr cc)

Technology can’t be trusted to solve commuter woes since it’s the root cause. Beyond the existential choice to advance my career, the reason individuals commute across the country really comes down to one thing.

“Because they can,” says Gordon price, a former Vancouver city councillor who directs Simon Fraser University’s urban planning and sustainable development program. “People are trying things out because these options exist.”

Price sees commuter marriage as a “real aberration” of what he calls “motordom,” Motordom is built on technology and the false assumption of nearly free transportation. Lives, in turn, are constructed on road accessibility, a calculation of the trade-off between distance and quality of life, or where they can commute and afford a mortgage. The more people on the roads, the more congestion creates demand for bigger and wider roads. The bigger the road, the further out of town the commute takes. It makes heads spin and cities massive.

Commuter marriages are based on similar algebra: quality of life – distance and time. While the average commuter will tolerate a trip of up to roughly 40 minutes, commuter marriages just come up with a bigger number and a different way of eliminating the remainder. In a sense, we’re all commuters, Price says. Because we can.

Motordom is often blamed for congestion, sprawl and blight. But Price identifies another problem – ballooning infrastructure costs – which assume continual growth, cheap service land, and secure energy. Whatever you think of motordom, the fundamental question is whether it’s infrastructure is sustainable.

“Can government keep doing that?” Price asks. “I think the odds are practically zero.”

Sprawl aside, Price is a fan of the possibilities of technology. Advances in telecommunications are on the cusp of providing corporations a virtual face-to-face alternative to moving employees across the globe.

“The technology is getting good enough,” Price says, that long-distance commuting “will be increasingly offset by the quality of the telecommunications.”

But even if video-conferencing is embraced wholeheartedly in the corporate world, it won’t be the death of the commute. As long as families are able, they will still plant themselves within an affordable 40 minute radius of their other destinations. Because they can.

Photo by Khairil Zafri (Flickr cc)

It may be driven by planes, and not cars, but one of the hidden costs of commuter marriage is carbon emissions.

The weekly activity of flying has an enormous ecological impact. According to the International Civil Aviation Organization carbon calculator, the aviation regulator of the United Nations, Wilson’s weekly flight from Edmonton to Toronto will consume an average of 8,631 kilograms of fuel, generating 243.09 kilograms of CO2 per passenger. If she makes the trip forty times over the course of her year in Toronto, that’s a whopping 19.5 metric tons of greenhouse gases just to go to work. The average Canadian, already the eighth worst generator of CO2, generates an average of 16 metric tons each year.

But that’s a conservative estimate. The numbers at the carbon offset dealing website Less.ca are less rosy. Ranked by the David Suzuki Foundation as the best dealer, Less estimates Wilson’s weekly commute creates nearly 80 tons of CO2, costing a whopping $3,733.20 to offset.

Wilson can’t help but think about the environmental impact of her weekly airplane trips. She even catches herself rationalizing her trips.

“You start thinking, ‘Even if I wasn’t on the plane, there’s still a hundred other people on the plane and the flight would still go if I wasn’t there,’” laughs Wilson.

Like most people, the Wilsons try to make environmentally-friendly choices, even if they know it doesn’t balance their current lifestyle: Smart car, fervent recycling. But Wilson doesn’t buy into any delusions of cosmic balance: the decision to commute is to lessen the psychological toll.

“It sure does bug me, but man oh man, I can’t not come home,” says Wilson.

Beep.

The elevator doors chime and open at the Oakville retirement home. When Alison Wilson meets one of her elderly neighbours, she often finds herself explaining why she’s there.

“They always ask who I’m visiting,” laughs Wilson. When she replies, she is met with frowns and furrowed brows.

“You should see the look on their faces,” Wilson says, breaking into her impression of a sweet old grandmother. “They’re like, ‘Why would you want to live with us old people?’ They don’t get it.”

Wilson’s own assessment of the commuter life is mixed. She loves her job, loves her company, and sees a bright future not far away. The emotional and relational toll, on the other hand, knocks her squarely into mundane reality. After eight months in an old folks home, she sounds world-weary and worn-out.

“I’m not as driven to progress my career if I have to sacrifice this much,” says Wilson. “I would never leave Edmonton again. If that hinders my chances of getting promoted, so be it. It’s really not worth it.”

But Wilson tries not to let it get her down. Like many commuters, she has an exit strategy in place. Eight months in, there’s just over two years left. She’s already counting down.

“You’ve got to justify it to yourself every time you get kind of down or upset you’re doing this and you’re away from your family,” she says.

“It is only temporary, you know?”

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The 1,000 Mile Marriage (Part 2 of 3)

July 26, 2010

This is part 2 of a 3 part feature article I wrote last fall for a class with David Beers. Part 1 is here. Part 3 is here.

The retirement home setting may be unique, but commuter marriage is nothing new. In the mid-1970s, journalists spat out a succession of catchphrases to herald a happening in North American households. Instead of familiar patterns of travelling salesmen or military families, women were pursuing careers – not just jobs – of their own. A growing number wound up in what were dubbed “weekend marriages” or “dual-household marriages.” The unions, pundits noted, often occurred at financial cost rather than benefit. More often than not, they begged the question: does it really work?

Photo by Burning Image (Flickr cc)

Not especially well, it turned out.

Publish-or-perish academic couples were among the first to give commuter marriage a whirl. Fittingly, they were equally quick to study it. A succession of studies surveyed dozens of commuters, many of them also academics, tackling everything from personal finances to adultery. Scholarly restraint fails to dampen the sentiment of one seminal study, Commuter Marriage (1984) by sociologists Harriet Gross and Naomi Gerstel: “we, like commuters themselves, would rather see a world where career demands cost less, and responded more, to the family life of women and men.”

Between jaunts to the extremities of the University of British Columbia campus, family sociologist James White tells me divorce rates are higher for commuter couples. Transition zones, he says, are the major fault line. To adjust to living with someone, it takes three days to segue from bachelor life and back into cohabitation. When a couple only catches up on weekends, that adjustment is never made.

“The person’s used to living without a spouse,” says White. “They come back and they have to readjust to having somebody sharing their space, using the bathroom.”

A marriage can always gel or crack, but commuting adds pressure to the dynamic. That’s what makes evaluating the successfulness of commuter marriages difficult. Do commuter marriages falter because of the commute, or because the lifestyle attracts people with different expectations for their marriage?

“Commuter marriages are more likely to be egalitarian,” White notes. “They’re most likely to have separate bank accounts. We know from study after study that one of the best predictors of divorce is having separate bank accounts. Having a common bank account means people are committed: you’re sharing everything.”

White thinks this “selection effect” has gone untested in much of the literature on commuter marriage. What might look like an unhappy commuter may actually be flying from stress at home, such as the growing possibility of an autistic child. Or they might simply see marriage as a relationship for an ongoing development of self that can run its course. But each case is different. That’s why it’s no surprise that many commuter marriages work well.

So it’s not all gloomy news for commuter couples. Commuters, especially women, express happiness with how the arrangement frees them from sacrificing their careers. The studies also reveal several other interesting tidbits:

  • Bored with marriage? Try commuting! Commuters say they are less likely to bicker or bore. There simply isn’t the time for it.
  • Newlywed or Nearly-dead? Commuters tend to fall into “establishing” and “established” demographics, either before children or as empty nesters. Young children tend to sully the lifestyle.
  • Friends? What friends?: Commuter marriage may have a greater impact on other relationships. Weekends are reserved for spouses. Friends tend to get squeezed out.
  • Family = coresidence?: Commuter marriage literature has branched into an array of LATs, or “living apart together” arrangements. Some couples keep two apartments for the sake of sanity.

Thirty years after splashing into the news, commuter marriages are still driven by the same motivations: the quest for a better job, better money, or better prospects. But the double-household’s taken some interesting twists and turns. In addition to mounting economic and environmental pressures, advances in technology makes commuting an ever-evolving creature.

Photo by dherrera_96 (Flickr cc)

The honeymoon officially over, Lisa Cramer stood at the Peace Arch, weeping.

A border guard had accused the 33-year-old Langley native of illegally attempting to smuggle her new American husband, Tim, into Canada. Hours after a Disneyworld vacation, the couple had their marriage certificate and proof of marriage in hand, along with Tim’s belongings. Married or not, barked the guard, Tim needed permanent residence status – another year’s wait time – before getting a visitor record necessary to come and bring his belongings into B.C.

Cramer was at her wit’s end.

“I said to them, ‘This is ridiculous,’” Cramer recalls just days after the confrontation. As she’s talking, she deconstructs a wall of wedding gifts behind her couch.

“I’ve been working on immigration papers for the last three months. I came to the border and asked three different immigration officers what to do and we did exactly what they told us to do.’”

A cross-border marriage sounds romantic, even dangerous. In reality, it is the essence of tedium and a boon to the Pacific Northwest’s struggling pulp and paper industry.

Lisa Cramer could have a black belt in filling out forms. In addition to work as an insurance manager in Surrey, she has a home business selling microfibre cleaning products. But nothing prepared her for the bureaucratic nightmare of an international commuter marriage.

The guard eventually yielded and granted Tim a six-month visitor’s visa. Disaster neatly averted, the couple is still staring at a stack of paperwork and a monster commute for the foreseeable future, especially at the beginning of her marriage. Tim owns a commercial janitorial business in Everett, Washington, and will commute three times every week, staying over one night, while spinning nearly 50,000 kilometres on his odometer each year.

It may be a stressful start to ever after, but the Cramers’ show how social networking may be creating commuter marriages. Instead of meeting within set geographical confines – at a bar, work, church, or through friends – Lisa and Tim met online on eHarmony. The American-based internet dating juggernaut pooh-poohs the chance of proximity, boasting instead that its 258-questions and sophisticated algorithms will net you your better half. While the company closely guards information about how many Canadians use the service, they claim 20 million worldwide members and an average of 236 eWeddings per day.

“It was the best system,” says Cramer. “I didn’t have to look and research and search. It just got matches that were good for me.”

While Cramer credits the service for an excellent match, she actually specified “no Americans” on her survey. When eHarmony kept insisting on Tim as an option, she couldn’t help considering him. And while they may have matched well based on affinity, the logistical nightmare of the border is already wearing thin.

“I love my husband, but just don’t marry an American,” says Cramer. “I think we’ll be commuting for the rest of our lives.”

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The 1,000 Mile Marriage (Part 1 of 3)

July 25, 2010

This is a the first part of a feature article I wrote last fall for a UBC journalism class taught by The Tyee editor David Beers and music writer Chris Smith. In all the thesis-completion stress (and successive internships), I never ended up shopping it around.   ****GUILT****  It’s a little too late now, hence it’s here. Fer nothin’. Hope you like it. (Part 2 here, Part 3 here)

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

Alison Wilson hunts for patterns in her stippled-ceiling condominium. She can’t sleep. Her next door neighbour’s ill-mannered medical equipment isn’t helping. The signal rattles past paint, drywall and eardrum before swimming through her cochlea and pounding her brain.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

Photo by Marina Avila (Flickr cc)

It’s life in a suburban-Toronto old folk’s home. But unlike her neighbours, Wilson’s no senior. She doesn’t even deem her Oakville home home. At 29, Wilson is decades from honing shuffleboard skills or jazzercise techniques. You’re more likely to find her on Skype or cranking out a final email at the end of an already-too-long workday.

Wilson is one of a legion 20- to 30-somethings living in a commuter marriage, relationships where dual career advancement trumps the expense and pain of having to maintain two homes, often hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles apart.

According to the latest census figures, 556,000 married Canadians don’t live with their partners. But that statistic is unwieldy and blunt. The assumption that couples live together is so firmly entrenched, statisticians simply lump commuter couples with unravelling or strained marriages. Nobody knows how many are out there.

Yet a number of signs point to the increasing importance of commuting marriage as a strategy for balancing the demands of work and home. Relationships are changing: first comes life, then comes marriage (maybe), then comes an average of one-point-six baby carriages. Careers too. Job security and company loyalty is decreasing, flexibility is an asset, and more women are primary breadwinners with advanced degrees. Pieced together, it points to an increasing likelihood that tying the knot doesn’t mean either partner will give up on the career ladder.

While commuter marriage may appear robust, it may soon be headed for life support. In addition to persistent questions about social and psychological costs, the sustainability problem refuses to go away.

Photo by epsos.de (Flickr cc)

It all boils down to quality of life. Debating a commute? You’ll probably factor in money, career benefits, and opportunities. Living it? One thing stands out: the chasm between the worlds of work and home.

Wilson’s life epitomizes the brutal split. Nearly every Friday afternoon, the elderly Ontarian ambles onto a plane, wearily heading 3,200 km west to a south Edmonton duplex. Three days later, she returns a vibrant twenty-something Albertan, whipping out laptop and iPod for a 3 hour, 36 minute “bus ride.”

Double life came via marriage. Alison met her partner, Travis, during a 2002 engineering co-op semester in Lloydminster. Travis eventually followed her back to Edmonton. She caught on at a general contracting firm, while he landed in Refinery Row. They married in 2007.

When Wilson decided to pursue project management, she needed experience as a “project coordinator” to get there. Back-to-back projects in Edmonton were cancelled, but a charmed third chance appeared last fall in the intial stages of economic collapse. The only snag? A one-year move to Toronto, plus two more at a bitumen mine on the outskirts of Fort McMurray. Alison and Travis bit the bullet.

“Do I want the experience or do I want to turn it down?” Wilson deadpans the dilemma over the phone. Having just returned to Edmonton, her voice crackles from jet-lag and a common cold.

“Maybe I don’t get anything and I don’t have that opportunity to further my career..”

Life took an “adult living” twist when a bright-eyed realtor walked Wilson through a fully-furnished complex close to work. Things took a strange turn at the basement rec facilities.

“The realtor said, ‘Look! There’s a putting green and full-on shuffleboard layout, and oh! Do you like swimming?’”

Confused, Wilson pressed on and bobbed her head neutrally.

“She shows me this pool. You can lower your wheelchair into the pool. Really, really shallow. Then she takes me into the workout room and it’s these two-pound and one-pound weights. And I’m like, ‘Something’s not right here.’”

Everything became clear when Wilson entered the “fully-catered” dining room and saw a sea of trifocals and grey hair.

“I’m thinking, ‘Holy shit, this is a retirement home!’ I had no idea.”

Since Wilson is over 18, no legal impediments prevent her from renting the condo. And since Wilson wasn’t in Oakville for the wheelchair-accessibility, her agent bagged a commission.

It may suit her needs, but Wilson refuses to let her condo become home. She has no plants. She even leaves her makeup in an airport-ready ziploc bag as a way of signalling to herself that this is not permanent.

“Travis is like, ‘Why don’t you put stuff away, why don’t you make this place homier?’” says Wilson. “I wouldn’t ever try to make it feel like my home.”

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The Sexual Abuse Crisis: Deliver us from Evil and Doubt

July 20, 2010

It’s one of the most difficult religion stories of the past three decades.

And it’s far from over. How could it be?

Glen's Pics (Flickr Creative Commons)

Over the past decade, the Catholic church has been rocked by sexual abuse scandals around the world. And for virtually every sin of commission (an abuse victim coming forward), there seems to have been multiple sins of omission (allegations that offenses went unpunished by bishops, archbishops, etc).

The sins of omission are possibly more damning than the crimes themselves. It’s one thing to have sexual abuse within the Church – should we ever be surprised that abuse is coupled with spiritual power? – but it’s another to simply shuffle an admitted child molester to another parish and a new set of victims. Former Los Angeles Times religion reporter Bill Lobdell says that the Church’s attempts at obfuscation led him to abandon his faith.

The New York Times recently published a 4,000-word feature attributing the sin of omission to Pope Benedict XVI. The piece has had some mixed responses. Some media watchers have labeled the coverage as a “tendentious hatchet job.” Mark Silk, on the other hand, is on the side of defending the piece as essentially accurate, if only in need of slight editorial revisions. But whether or not you think Pope Benedict is responsible for hiding the abuse (or think he’s finally exposing it), it’s clear that the scandal will be one of the dismal legacies of his papacy.

Last week, the Vatican announced revisions to canon law surrounding sexual abuse. For one, they doubled the statue of limitations for prosecuting abusive priests. A second change aimed at streamlining legal procedures for prosecution of sex abuse cases.

Critics are virtually unanimous in saying the revisions don’t go far enough. The Church has responded that it’s only a first step. The most glaring omission is that the Church is not requiring mandatory reporting of all allegations of abuse. Here’s the Edmonton Journal’s editorial response:

The Church’s response is particularly galling in light of everything we now know — from lawsuits, criminal trials and public inquiries — of its own role in keeping those allegations secret for so long.

For the Vatican to now appear to be doing anything less than everything possible to prevent future abuse is a betrayal of past victims. But it is also a betrayal of the millions of Catholics who have given their lives to the Church and trusted in its teachings to guide them along a moral path.

It’s hard to write anything other than something along those lines. This is a horrific story with clear perpetrators and clear victims. Steps taken in response to abuse need to be commensurate with the problem. More is needed.

I’ve decided to write a bit about two movies I’ve watched in recent months about sexual abuse in the Church. I highly recommend both films. Both attempt to deliver something more than just criminals and victims and graphic details. Both attempt to provide psychological insights into sexual abusers and the inability of an institution to recognize its fallibility. These are lessons that extend beyond the confines of the Catholic Church.

Deliver Us From Evil (2006): Amy Berg’s documentary offers a unique glimpse into the mind of an abusive priest, Oliver O’Grady.  Between the 1973 until the early 1990s, Fr. Ollie abused numerous children (at least 25) in a series of Northern Californian parishes. After one of the earliest instances of abuse in 1976, O’Grady wrote a letter of apology to the victim’s parents. The parents agreed not to press charges on the condition that O’Grady was to be removed, receive counseling, and not to work with children.

Instead of being removed from the priesthood, O’Grady was passed to another parish within two years, and eventually three other parishes by the time he was convicted on four counts of lewd and lascivious acts in 1993. After spending seven years in prison, he was shuffled back to his native Ireland, where he resided on a Church pension until this film was released. He has since been chased to new locations, most recently the Netherlands, where he was found calling himself “Brother Francis” and helping out at a local church.

Amazingly, O’Grady (or Father Ollie) agreed to be interviewed in the documentary. Father Ollie is a fascinating, even charismatic character (he describes himself as a “people person), eloquently expressing remorse and freely accepting blame (and any label handed him). With Irish whimsy, he delineates the circumstances around the abuse, describes his own moral dilemmas and twisted logic. He describes in detail his interactions with ecclesiastical hierarchy and how he was continually handed new opportunities to abuse. He admits that he should have been removed and more should have been done. He also hopes to make things right by writing a letter to each of his victims.

Deliver us from Evil is most effective when it counters Father Ollie’s testimony with that of his victims and their families. In contrast to the priest’s easy candor, feigned lapses in memory, and over-reliance on euphemisms, his victims are wounded, scarred, and angry. It’s clear Father Ollie is still the sick manipulator who devoted much of his priestly energies to grooming victims, and it’s clear he doesn’t really get what he did. His suggested solution, to meet his victims face-to-face and apologize (hoping not for a hug, but perhaps a handshake), is essentially akin to re-victimization.

Towards the end, however, the film gets sidetracked with heavy-handed moral outrage (the newscast seen at the beginning of this clip). Abuse victims pull a stunt at the Vatican. Crusaders for victims rights are given free reign to analyze the shortcomings of the Church. It’s a shame, really, because the message doesn’t really need reiteration or amplification. It’s damning enough on its own.

Doubt (2008): Not a documentary, but a play-turned feature. Doubt’s stellar cast includes Meryl Streep as a harsh, authoritarian nun, Amy Adams as a young, slightly naive nun, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a young, charismatic priest.

Adams stands in for the viewer, a new arrival at a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, trying to understand the internal politics of the place.

Give credit to Hoffman for a nearly flawless performance of a priest who is a gifted communicator, a modernizer, and yet falls under suspicion. Streep is brilliant as always, in her portrayal of a hurt human being who only allows herself to be the school’s no nonsense bad cop.

It’s hard to say much else about this film. It’s heartbreaking.

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