the end is not yet

Imagine you have two young daughters. You live with them and your husband in a trailer. You work nights cleaning a university. Then one day you faint, take a trip to the hospital and discover you have cancer so bad it'll kill you in three months.

Did I mention that you're only 23?

Such is the set-up for Sarah Polley's latest film, My Life Without Me.

I saw it Wednesday night and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was sad without being depressing. In a number of ways it was oddly heartwarming, though as Steph said after we watched it, it had its cheesy moments.

The opening scene made me chuckle though. In it Polley is standing barefoot in the grass, in the rain, soaking wet, just feeling it sluice over her.

I laughed because I've done that. Two summers ago. I was in an odd mood, feeling twitchy and disconnected. The girl I was dating at the time was on another continent, having gone to France for four months.

The rain was coming down one night and I'd never just stood in a downpour. So I took off my shirt and went out into the backyard of the house I was sub-letting wearing nothing but an old pair of cargo pants.

I must have stood there with my eyes closed for nearly a half hour. When I came back in, I was calm again. Sane again.

The lead story in the Toronto Star's GTA section today was Gun crimes 'out of control'. My first thought was, "When were gun crimes ever under control?"

It's a scary story that raises a lot of important points. It's all about how bad the gun situation is getting in Toronto. It calls for action before things get worse. I've notice quite a few similar stories in the last week or so.

Now I need to check some numbers before I can be sure, but I do believe this is a bit of a moral panic.

A moral panic is what happens when the public fear of a social problem blows up out of proportion to the actual threat. You can tell when such a thing happens when newspapers, politicians and interest groups start making a collective fuss over a problem that has just gotten some media attention. Sometimes a panic will start over a problem that doesn't actually exist, but just appears to.

To quote from Mary deYoung's Moral Panics: The Case of Satanic Day Care Centers, "Through the use of highly emotive claims and fear-based appeals, a moral panic tends to orchestrate cultural consent that something must be done, and quickly to deal with this alleged threat."

deYoung explains that this serves a function, stabilizing society in a time of strain. This is because the social problem usually challenges the dominant values of a society and the collective consent that spreads in the wake of a moral panic tends to reaffirm those values.

Now, none of this means that the subject of a moral panic isn't a bad thing that needs to be dealt with. Nor does it mean that a moral panic is either a good or a bad thing. It just means that we should be skeptical when newspapers, polticians and interest groups all start jumping up and down about the same thing at the same time.

Having said that, I'm going to jump up and down a little myself.

There is a very positive trend to a lot of the 'gun violence' stories I've been reading lately. They tend to point out that gun control in Canada works and that a number of firearms used in crimes are illegal firearms smuggled into Canada from the U.S.

Two relevant quotes from the above story:

"People say `Oh smuggled guns, therefore gun control doesn't work,'" said [Wendy] Cukier, a professor of justice studies at Ryerson University.

"I would turn that around and say they're smuggled guns because gun control does work, and if the United States only had decent gun control, we shouldn't have such a problem," Cukier said.

It should be noted - with a smile, mind you - that Cukier is also the president of the Coalition for Gun Control.

Howling outside my window right now is what the newscaster called the "worst snowstorm of the season." It's been steadily dropping snow on us all day.

It was grocery day again, so I ploughed through snow up past my ankles from the University to the grocery store. It took nearly a half hour, though on a day without the snow it only takes about fifteen minutes.

The snow didn't bother me though. It's the kind of weather I always loved when I was a kid.

I got my groceries and made it out to the bus stop a mere ten minutes after it was supposed to drive by. Which on a normal day would have meant I still had another five minutes to wait.

This was not a normal day.

Shortly after I got to the bus stop a young woman - about my age - came trooping through the storm from the direction the bus was supposed to be coming. She carefully made her way down the slope to the parking lot and started her car.

I began to wonder if maybe the bus had already passed.

When she got out to clean the half foot of snow off it, I called out to her. I hesitated a moment before doing so. I didn't want to make her feel threatened.

She straightened and looked behind her towards the buildings. She was wearing a hat and had her hood pulled up. Sound must have been a little muffled.

"Over here," I called.

She looked at me and smiled.

"Yes?" she said.

"You didn't happen to see the bus pass you as you were walking this way, did you?"

"The Gordon street bus?" she asked.

"Yes."

"No. Which is good news for you, eh?"

We both laughed. I went back to waiting and she went back to clearing off the car. Don't ask why, but I actually considered offering to clear it for her. It was only after remembering that people don't do such things and that it would make little sense for me to do it did I discard the idea.

A few moments later she called to me.

"Are you in a rush to get somewhere?"

"Not really," I said. A little surprised.

"I was just going to offer you a ride somewhere if you were in a rush."

I said I was fine, that the bus would probably be along shortly. I was just going back to the house. No real reason to rush there.

"You sure?" she asked.

With the snow swirling down around us and nobody else around, I thought for a moment more before saying I was sure and thanking her.

She shrugged, smiled, got in her car and drove off.

I'm an exceptionally cynical guy a lot of the time. I spent four years studying criminal behaviour. I spend a fair chunk of each day reading the news. I'm well aware of how terrible people can be to each other and how often people act solely out of self interest.

It's sometimes a shock to see a person offer to do something for a stranger simply because they want to help.

CCJ writes:

"The central purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with accurate and reliable information they need to function in a free society."

I love these guys. They're the Committee of Concerned Journalists. They spent over five years interviewing other journalists in order to put together a coherent theory of journalism. I subscribe to that theory. It was actually that theory that made me decide to be a journalist.

A damn good summary of it can be found at the above link.

Since I'll likely be commenting on a number of things in this blog, it would probably be useful to give a little background on myself. Just so you know when I'm talking out of my ass and when I might actually be talking about something I have some knowledge about.

A warning: I'm known by some as the king of contradictions.

Another warning: This won't be a linear train of thought.

I grew up in a log house on a 50-acre plot of land outside of a small town in rural Ontario. Vast, barren fields separated us from our nearest neighbour to the north. Thick, green bush hid our nearest neighbour to the south.

I was raised a hunter in a family of hunters. I received a pellet gun for my seventh birthday and was an expert shot by my eighth. I haven't hunted since I was sixteen.

The town had nearly 4,000 people. When people ask what you do for fun there, the standard response is, "Go somewhere else."

I started studying martial arts near the end of public school. Began with karate, moved on to kung fu and on again to kempo, earning my first degree black belt in it and teaching for a year. I hate violence.

Highschool taught me the only thing I really enjoyed was writing fiction. But I went to university in Guelph and got my honours degree in Criminal Justice & Public Policy. The program is a hybrid major, composed of criminology and political science. I graduated in the summer of 2003 with my BAH.

A series of lateral shifts over the four years brought my career goals from criminologial research to politics to lobbying to journalism.

During my third year I started copyediting for the campus newspaper.

In my fourth year I wrote news for the paper. An incredibly busy and stressful year for me. I was writing for the paper every week, doing a full course load, working part-time at a gas-station - yes, I was an eco-Nazi - and doing my undergraduate thesis.

The thesis was on newspaper coverage of youth crime in Ontario.

I'm the paper's news editor this year.

I'm a Taoist and an environmentalist. I don't eat red meat, but I think hunting is morally justifiable.

My politics are extremely left-leaning, but I despise the actions of extreme political protestors.

I've worked with kids every summer for the last six years, working with kids with special needs for the last three. It's the most fulfilling work I've ever done. Yet after careful thought I dismissed working with children as a career path.

But whatever else I am, I'm a journalist first and foremost.

From today's Globe and Mail (It's frozen, but it's water):

Darmstadt, Germany — Europe's Mars Express orbiter has confirmed the presence of water in the form of ice on the planet's surface for the first time, the European Space Agency said Friday.

Very cool. As I understand it, if Mars once had liquid water, it is possible it once had life.

A Globe and Mail story yesterday (Province to target gun crime, A1) featured comments by Mark Pugash, a "police spokesman."

Mr. Pugash said Chief Fantino has raised concerns about the criminal justice system. "Eighty-four per cent of the people we arrest for violent crime have previous criminal records. . . The system is not deterring or rehabilitating people, and so you get these revolving-door criminals."

He's right. The Canadian criminal justice system doesn't reliably deter or rehabilitate criminals. How can it when so many conflicting goals have been set out in our legislation on sentencing?

Judges are given multiple, conflicting goals. They include rehabilitiation, deterrence, incapacitation, and retribution.

A deterring sentence is rarely conducive to rehabilitation. A rehabilitative sentence will not satisfy those who want to incapacitate offenders by removing them from society because an integral part of rehabilitation is reintegrating them into society.

But people think they can achieve all of these goals during sentencing. In trying to do so, they don't achieve any of them very well.

Earlier this week my digital voice recorder nearly blew up.

I'm the news editor for the university newspaper here and I write freelance articles for a magazine about the research done at the university. That day, I had done two fairly lengthy interviews for each publication. So this was a bad thing.

I carry the damn thing with me everywhere I go. In case I need it. At the end of the day I took it out of my pocket and noticed it was warm.

No, not warm. It was hot. Far hotter than it should have been just sitting in my pocket.

That was disconcerting enough. Even worse was the blank digital display, which always has at least the time on it.

I took the batteries out and found them to be near scalding. Worried they were about to blow up - yes, batteries have been known to do that - or leak battery acid all over my hands, I dropped them into a nearby resealable bag.

Starting to swear, I yanked the batteries out of my television remote and tried them in the recorder. Nothing happened until I took out the batteries. That was when random characters started flashing on the screen.

I tried this a couple times, the same thing happening each time.

Finally, fed up, I threw the recorder down on my bed and stomped off to watch television for a few hours. I was resigned to the fact that both interviews were likely gone, but hopeful that the recorder would be okay once we had each had a chance to cool down.

When I came back, the television remote batteries did nothing. For the hell of it, I took the now cool batteries out of the bag, wiped the crumbs off - the bag had held cookies until recently - and tried them again.

The unit turned on. The data was intact.

Big sigh of relief.

I spent twenty minutes in a blizzard waiting for a bus today after work.

There were about fifteen of us.

It's a regular thing with that route.